The Voice Reached Us Through the Floor,
but the Words Themselves Were Lost

Memory Palace
David M.C. Miller

The writing of light at photography's origins, a shimmering world of crystalline motifs and
shadows, echoes in Petra Malá Miller's photographs. The 15 colour photographs that
comprise this enigmatic installation add to the artist's growing body of works that explore
themes of childhood, adolescence, family and identity, innocence and loss, and the
relationship between photography and personal memory.

To fully appreciate these photographs we must look beyond the allure of the images
themselves to an obvious but overlooked truth. Photography begins with an act. While the
desire to document the world as-it-is underpins and motivates many photographers, in Malá
Miller's work we confront a different impulse. Rather than preserving things for posterity
through the photographic record, the artist uses the camera to add fragments of material and
symbolic evidence to a picture of her past. Without succumbing to nostalgia, these
photographs offer "to redeem the past by taking responsibility for the unknown futures of
moments that have already passed."[i] Of course the past cannot be photographed. The
childhood recollections she re-stages can only be alluded to, transcribed through memory
after the fact, since the "true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an
image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
"[ii]For Malá Miller, the camera as an aide-mémoire is a key to self-knowledge and self-
construction.

Concerned with memory, its necessity, its unreliability and fertile power, the artist's project is
primarily autobiographical—but the photographs defy precise definition.[iii] Several are staged
tableaux. In others, the artist adopts the point-of-fact style of lyrical documentary
photography.[iv] Fact and fiction jostle one another. The portraits of a preadolescent boy and
girl live double lives. Like a mirror image reflecting one's left side as one's right, the children,
cast in porcelain light, play themselves but are also modeled on the artist's former self, as a
child. The allegorical doubling continues. Masculine and feminine, here and there, inside and
outside, light and darkness, blend together and drift apart, forming new relations. Borders of
all kinds dissolve. The artist's childhood memory, interlaces with the identities of the
children, whose chaste features and genders blur. The two portraits locate the project in
narrative time, the artist's past, a prepubescent flowering, an age of innocence. A rear-view
mirror, as drivers are warned, can make the reckoning of distance hard to achieve. Looking
back, drawing the outlines of the past across the present, Malá Miller negotiates spans of time
and dislocations in space through recollection and projection; recollections stranded in time
and place, projections of things to come.

The subterranean voice alluded to in the exhibition title (And the Voice Reached Us Through
the Floor, but the Words Themselves Were Lost) evokes a language beyond legibility, an
audible presence marked by erasure and rapture. Remote and rendered all but mute, speech
transforms into images—into residual traces of former presence. The artist yearns to restore
and decipher the voice's irrevocable decay. The inscription of loss and desire at the core of
her work is a braided conjecture, borne from the principles of narration, and from the
contingencies of the here and now. Like a shroud woven from Ariadne’s thread laid upon a
figure of loss preserved for eternity, Malá Miller's photographs seem to absorb the haunted
silence she uncovers from memory. She writes:

I sometimes dream about my grandmother. Like other involuntary
remembrances, these dreams rekindle and temporally collapse my
grandmother’s final weeks with my feelings for her then and now. Today, 
ten years later, I more easily recall and understand the look in her eyes
as she gazed out from behind her bedroom window watching me leave
home for school. Melancholic, a sense of immanent loss and futility
consumed her.

I look over my shoulder and see her face watching me through the glass
pane. The ritual repeats each day, she conveys her final goodbye until one
morning, eyes wide open, mouth breathless and silent, my grandmother
dies. Her stout presence, so physically commanding in life, the way only
maternal bodies can be, belies an utter stillness. Gently, fearfully, I lower
her eyelids and shut her eyes.[v]

A narrative without beginning or end relies upon the artist's ability to combine different
representational modes, into a single, coherent body. It is comprised of multiple, overlapping
stories, sequenced by a chain of memory (Freud's phrase), and links each photograph to the
next. Malá Miller aligns the Romantic appeal to emotions as a credible source for aesthetic
experience with the Realist fondness for describing the world as it is. Imagination meets
reason as the artist's allegorical allusions share the stage with the objective and the literal.
Thresholds of actuality are crossed between perception, memory and fiction.

Malá Miller first turned to allegory in her early narrative cycle from 2005, House No. 20. She
continued in 2006 with, The Further the Train Moves Away From That House, the Better
I Feel, and in 2007, People for the Children. In 2008 she produced, And She Said She Is
Looking, a monumental work exploring four generations of women in her family. Each
photographic cycle relied on conscious and unconscious recollections and combined staged
tableaux with lyrical documentary photography[vi].

The artist grew up in southern Moravia during a time of ideological change. The nascent
capitalist dream-of-plenty blazed from hotly coloured vinyl signage pasted on newly minted
shop windows. This emancipatory rhetoric combined with a deep yearning amongst Czechs
to awaken a hope for positive change in all spheres of daily life. With social relations
radically shifting, questions posed by feminism and other cultural critiques joined the
struggle for political freedom that had, for the most part, already been won by the time the
artist enrolled in art school. This context forms the backdrop for her generation's aspirations
and for the artist's own conviction that images could play a significant role in establishing
legitimacy to the themes of family and generational change; the poetics of childhood and
other unwritten passages silenced by the official ideologies of the Communist past and the
Capitalist present. While studying in the ecstatic milieu of post-soviet Prague, she developed
an aesthetic approach that understood the photograph as a potent key to opening history,
permitting her to see the past—to see what Paul Klee's ‘Angelus Novus’ stares at as he is
blown backwards into the future.

Malá Miller borrows fidelity from documentary with all its suspicions; from painting she
borrows a plastic depth and the possibility of representing anything imaginable; from cinema
she borrows time, of which montage and duration are its fluid expression; from fashion, the
economies of display; from literature she hears her own voice conjuring worlds wholly
formed. There, ever mindful, she finds narrative pounding like a heart beating back time.
From theatre she steals props and the suspension of disbelief, and in whose figure she
recognizes herself as both actor and acted, as audience and stage. From popular culture she
borrows relentlessness, insatiability and the short-lived, the veiled residue of eternity. She
feels her way through the blind violence implicit in her chosen medium, beyond the
superficiality of things as they appear. Petra Malá Miller photographs what she sees, what she
knows and what she wants to forget. Lyrical, playful, touched with melancholy, beauty lies in
each picture's hold and arrests our attention.

Establishing Shot: The mercury glow of street lamps mixing with the waning sun’s lustrous
blue, tricks the darkness as evening begins to fold upon the stretch of asphalt that severs the
distant coulees from the urban core. A lone bus shelter glows in mid-distance, making visible
its share of luster, its order, as might a lighthouse beam when it cries out through night and
fog to announce uncertain shores. The upper two thirds of this photograph depicts open sky
and wayward clouds. Ascending lamp poles pierce the horizon like surgical staples and stitch
the iridescence above to the ashen ground below. Pictorially and symbolically, these mute
details expose their author's voice: the semiotic equivalent to the writing of the artist's
epigraphic photographs.[vii]

Malá Miller's wide-angle lens compasses a primal vista and marks a spatial axis around
which her photographic narration revolves. How may we read a photograph’s stillness, the
light of silence, if not by first admitting complicity with the act of telling our own stories?
Recall the Voice in the opening act of creation: "let there be light." Notwithstanding further
charges or counter-readings, this photograph of an illuminated bus shelter on the brink of
dusk might be interpreted as a metaphor for the artist's project as a whole.[viii]