HARLAND MILLER, HIGH ON HOPE, SIGNED SCREEN PRINT, EDITION OF 75, 2019
Harland Miller began reworking the Penguin design heritage almost two decades ago, gaining notoriety for his playful celebration of the unison between art and literature. In High on Hope, Miller envisions Penguin’s post-war graphics once again, choosing to employ the most conventional paperback colour of all; orange.
The style of lettering in this work is reminiscent of the artist’s humorous titles of the past, one such example being Hate's Outta Date!. Rather than employing a shadowing technique to invoke dimension, however, the work experiments with angles and depth. The worn spine of the book is seemingly floating off canvas, similar to one of Miller’s earlier prints christened I’ll Never Forget What I Can’t Remember.
In terms of format, High On Hope is completely identical to a Penguin classic. Miller explicitly adopts the orange dust jacket’s standardized design, in order to place the words and their potential meaning on center stage. The artist here balances the comforting visuals of the revisited brand image against an advert like catch phrase. Therefore, High on Hope functions as a sly reflection on consumer culture and collective memory, in the same manner as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups once did.
Read more about Penguin prints by Harland Miller.
ABOUT HARLAND MILLER
Harland Miller is a British writer and artist, born in Yorkshire in 1964, best known for producing a series of paintings based on Penguin book covers, including International Lonely Guy and Fuck Art Let’s Dance. Miller’s work explores the relationship between words and images. His paintings, sculptures and mix-media artworks combine the two to comment on the frequent disconnect between representation and reality. Learn more about Harland Miller. .
