Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Their performances, always enacted together in public, push simple materials and actions to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. Their work is both autobiographical and metaphorical, speaking to common human interaction and queer relationships. Silhouettes of each other, their iconic beards, and their bodies appear regularly in their work. In their signature ongoing performance, “Untitled (Pink Tube)”, a non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. In “Untitled (Grave)”, Miller & Shellabarger dig two holes close together, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.
Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Hyde Park Art Center, all in Chicago and at INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, The Carnegie in Greater Cincinnati, and Gallery Diet in Miami. They have performed and have been exhibited in group shows across North America, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas; the Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho; Institute of Contemporary Art in Maine; and Sala Diaz in San Antonio. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Indiana University Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art, among others. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.