The houses in Fiskars, Finland, look the way houses are supposed to look, Noah Thomas Miller says. He was there earlier this year for an artist residency. “I would go on hikes and look at these country houses, and I feel like this is the way you thought the world was going to be when you were a little kid.”
The houses had matching red roofs, as if they’d been plucked out of an illustrated storybook. So he brought back those little buildings, engraving them into Baltic birch wood and painting them with those signature red roofs. “I made my own town in that same sort of way that’s very picturesque, just making these dreamy homes,” Miller says.
He even titled one of the pieces “Home Is a Dream I Keep Having,” and the dual UrbanArt Commission show he’s presenting with Sarah Moseley has taken on the same name. The two are friends and found inspiration in each other for the show. “Sarah is the first person outside of my sister that I’ve worked on pieces with,” Miller says.
For Miller, visual art is somewhat of a new bullet point for his resume. He’s been a filmmaker for most of his creative career; that’s what he studied at the Memphis College of Art. But after working behind a computer screen for so long at his day job, not even counting his hours spent editing film and looking at footage, he wanted to do something with his hands, to take a break from the all-consuming screens. So he signed up for a membership in Crosstown Arts’ woodshop only a few years ago.
He started with furniture. It was practical. Until it wasn’t. “We can only have so many tables, so many chairs.” But he learned the machines, the tools; he learned that he could carve grooves for coasters to stay put on tables and record cabinets. His skills evolved, and so did his ideas. “It was like, ‘Oh, I can use this to draw.’”
Soon, he was making paintings of sorts on wood. He would get his paint — house paint — mixed at Lowe’s. “I’m not a traditional painter. I’ve never studied painting. I just started doing this,” Miller says. For the past few years, he has had a set of five or so colors he turns to for his color palette. “They feel like my colors,” he says. In this show, he introduced a pale blue and brown, yet there’s comfort in this palette, a familiarity that’s not unlike home to the artist.
Likewise, it was natural that Miller turned to wood when in a creative need, for its familiarity. He’d always been working with the material, helping his dad renovate their homes. “I feel like every place we lived, my family renovated themselves,” he says. “We bought really cheap, and then our house was always just a construction site in a way. And growing up in that, this became familiar. And the last few series and shows I’ve had have all been kind of about houses and the idea of home because I do have the biggest attachment to all of these houses and my family members. … And then in a different way now, I paint houses and build houses.”
Miller hasn’t forgotten his love for film, though. “I know some people have described my pieces … like storyboards in a way,” he says, but for this show, he tried to marry the forms more overtly. In one piece, he inserted film strips from his time in Finland among carvings of his red-roofed houses — something he hopes to do more of for future pieces. In another piece, he has included a film photograph by Moseley, situated in the skies above another red-roofed home.
Moseley, for her part, turned to film for its unfamiliarity. She’s the art director at Goner Records and is used to working in digital design, creating posters, flyers, and props. It’s been years since her last solo art show in 2017, and back then she was showing collage and illustration mostly. “Making physical work unique to me is kind of a new exploration,” she says.
Photography was a break from the art she’d make for work, and a break from life around her. “A really good friend of mine died,” she says, “and he gave me a bunch of cameras when he was alive, and I put my cameras down for, like, seven years. I didn’t touch him for a long time. His death was traumatic. And then I was cleaning and I came across these vintage cameras that I’ve had forever, and I was like, ‘Well, I need to take these out and use them.’”
She began taking pictures of nature around her home, on her walking path along the Vollintine-Evergreen Greenline. “These flowers and trees, I feel like they are part of the house, my home. … It’s my mental chill pill,” she says. “I have a lot of anxious energies sometimes. I give it to the trees; they can handle it.”
Film, too, can handle her anxious energies, subverting her perfectionist tendencies, Moseley would learn. She began making double exposures, where two images layer in one photograph. “You just kind of let go and just see what happens. It’s so experimental and you really have no idea what you’re doing.”
These photographs, in turn, are centered in her pieces, framed in wood that had been stored in her house’s attic for years. The frames themselves are hand-painted in bright colors with symbols of life and death, new beginnings — candles, lit and extinguished; a sun and moon.
“I bought my first house in 2022,” Moseley says, “and it’s just something that I never thought I’d be able to do, and I got really lucky. And it’s a really old house with really old house problems. And I feel like the house is alive in a way, and I’ve been getting to know it.
“For this show, I contacted the lady that I bought the house from. She was like, ‘I’ll tell you my story about my life, how I ended up with the house, and what I did when I lived there.’ She sent me this, like, novel about the beautiful Sunday dinners she would have with her queer friends in the ’80s and moon nights and music nights. … It was just really beautiful to get to hear about the life that was lived before me in my house, like my studio.”
To Moseley, the house is active; its history matters, as do the people that come and go in search of home, of that dream. Perhaps it’s the dream of familiar red-roofed homes, consistent, filled with memories. Perhaps it’s something else, a longing that can’t be described or met until change comes around.
“Home Is a Dream I Keep Having” will be on view through July 18th.
