ART CITIES:Madrid-Nicole Miller
Known for her evocative videos and multimedia installations, California-based artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller frequently addresses themes such as race, translation, and the politics of representation. Notions of embodiment and articulation are common threads throughout Miller’s work. In recent years, a core aspect of her practice has involved collaborating with young people, especially youth of color. Her video installations examine how societal pressures and the violence of racism condition the experience of growing up in the United States, including how youth are perceived.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: carlier | Gebauer Gallery Archive
Nicole Miller presents “For Turiya”, her first solo exhibition in Madrid—an immersive work that marks a new chapter in the artist’s exploration of light, language, and transformation. Trained in filmmaking and writing, Miller builds her practice on storytelling and image-making, yet her work consistently moves beyond the frame. Through laser light, sculptural forms, and text, she creates environments where perception itself is unsettled, expanded, and renewed. At the center of her practice is the idea of transmutation—how one form slips into another, how sound becomes light, how memory becomes matter. The laser is Miller’s chosen instrument. Not simply a technological tool, it embodies transformation itself: sound waves transfigured into beams of light. In this gesture, the sensory order is reversed—one can hear with the eyes, see with the ears. The result is an experience that resists passive viewing; instead, it draws us into a heightened state of attention, a reminder that art is not just something to be looked at, but something to be metabolized. In Madrid, Miller unveils her most recent commission, the single-channel laser light installation For Turiya. The work is dedicated to Alice Coltrane (1937–2007)—pianist, harpist, composer, spiritual teacher, and visionary. Known to her family and community as Turiyasangitananda, or Turiya for short, Coltrane occupies a singular place in cultural history. After the passing of her husband, the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, she carved out her own luminous path. She released a body of music that blended jazz, devotional chants, and orchestral composition, creating a soundscape that was at once cosmic and deeply intimate. In the 1980s she founded an ashram outside Los Angeles, where she lived and taught as a swamini, guiding her community through music, meditation, and spiritual practice. Miller’s installation is both tribute and continuation. A radiant, “effulgent” beam of light cuts through darkness, continually breaking apart and recombining into shifting shapes and fleeting words. Like Coltrane’s music, the work unfolds in improvisational waves, always on the edge of disappearance, yet filled with presence. The laser conjures fragments of text—among them the phrase “a body made of words”—drawn from Miller’s research into Coltrane’s personal archive and Vedic astrology chart. The references are deliberately oblique, not offered as biography but as a gesture of reverence, a way of allowing Coltrane’s spiritual dimension to flicker into view without fixing it in place. In its luminous simplicity, “For Turiya” gestures toward the oldest human desire: to give form to the invisible, to bring something out of nothing. It recalls both the primordial marks on cave walls and the ecstatic improvisations of a harp or piano. Just as Alice Coltrane’s music transcended genre, carrying listeners into other states of being, Miller’s work pulls us into a space where art, sound, and language dissolve into one another. Ultimately, “For Turiya” is not only an homage to Coltrane’s legacy but also an invitation. It asks us to listen with our eyes, to see with our ears, and to recognize in the act of creation—whether musical, visual, or spiritual—a deeply human form of magic.
Photo: Nicole Miller, To the Stars, exhibition view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2023, Courtesy the artist and carlier | Gebauer Gallery
Info: carlier | Gebauer Gallery, Calle de José Marañón 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 11/9-25/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.carliergebauer.com/
