Digital Exhibition Catalogs for Greg Miller: True Romance & Jennifer Wolf: Utopalypse

William Turner Gallery currently has two solo shows on view: "Greg Miller: True Romance" and "Jennifer Wolf: Utopalypse". Jennifer Wolf’s art practice is deeply rooted in her personal connection to the Southern Californian landscape: she makes her own dyes and pigments, combining organic materials with state-of-the-art acrylic mediums. Her latest series –  “Utopalypse” – consists of highly evocative abstract pieces on silk mounted on wood. Greg Miller combines layered collages of ephemera collected from the 1950’s and 1960’s with large-scale, photorealistic paintings styled after the golden age of advertising and Americana. Much like an archaeologist delving into the layers of the earth to uncover fragments of the past, Miller digs into the layers of images and text to uncover hidden clues and meanings. Both “True Romance” and “Utopalypse” are ongoing through Saturday, August 16, and digital catalogs are available to view on the William Turner Gallery website.

Jennifer Wolf holds a BA in Art History from UCLA and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. A lifelong California resident, she has exhibited widely and has collaborated with William Turner Gallery since her first solo show in 2004.

Greg Miller (b. 1951) was born in Sacramento, California and holds a Master of Arts Degree from San Jose University. Once a long-time Venice, California resident, he currently resides in LA, CA & Austin, Texas. His work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of: the San Jose Museum of Art, Newport Harbor Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum,  Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation.  Greg Miller was the first exhibition at William Turner Gallery in 1991.  

Opening Tonight at William Turner Gallery - Greg Miller: True Romance & Jennifer Wolf: Utopalypse

William Turner Gallery is pleased to present True Romance, a solo exhibition by Greg Miller. Celebrated for his visually arresting and conceptually layered collages, Greg Miller continues his decades-long excavation of American mass media, memory, and myth-making. In this newest body of work, True Romance, Miller revisits the imagery that has long defined his practice—pulp fiction, billboard advertisements, vintage comics, magazine spreads, and Hollywood’s golden illusions—reassembling these cultural fragments into densely layered vignettes that are both nostalgic and interrogative.

Working in his signature blend of photorealism, gestural abstraction, and mixed-media collage, Miller constructs what might be described as visual archaeology. His compositions are not passive reflections of bygone Americana but rather active interrogations of how memory, media, and identity are constructed. Like an anthropologist of postwar culture, Miller peels back the layers of the American psyche, embedding his canvases with found texts, clipped advertisements, and iconographic symbols that shaped mid-century ideals of beauty, power, and romance.

While rooted in the seductive visual language of the 1950’s and 60’s, Miller’s work resists simple nostalgia. The cracked surfaces, distressed textures, and time-worn materials suggest not preservation but erosion—an acknowledgment that the past is as much invention as recollection. The romanticism embedded in these works—echoed in the exhibition’s title—is deliberately ambivalent, positioned somewhere between genuine longing and critical detachment.

Los Angeles, Miller’s longtime home and an enduring muse, reappears here as both setting and subject. Its palm-lined streets, glamour-soaked iconography, and ever-present mythos provide the perfect backdrop for the artist’s ongoing dialogue with American visual culture. In Miller’s hands, LA becomes a collage of its own: sexy, mysterious, dangerous. 

True Romance is more than a nostalgic ode; it is a cinematic montage of American desire, loss, and reinvention. Like the pulp novels and romance comics it references, each piece in the show contains a narrative—some suggested, some obscured, all inviting exploration. In Miller’s world, nothing exists in a vacuum; every image, every word is part of a larger, layered story. And in tracing those layers, we find not just echoes of a collective past, but clues to how that past continues to shape our present.

GREG MILLER: TRUE ROMANCE

JUNE 21 - AUGUST 16, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 21, 2025

William Turner Gallery is pleased to announce Utopalypse, a solo exhibition of new works by Jennifer Wolf. Utopalypse merges two seemingly opposing forces: utopia, the ideal or perfect place, and apocalypse, a moment of revelation often associated with collapse or ending. This fusion forms the conceptual core of Jennifer Wolf’s new exhibition, where the aspiration for beauty, harmony, and renewal exists alongside a deep awareness of fragility, decay, and transformation.

The works in this series live within this tension. Created with natural dyes on silk, the materials themselves embody this duality. The pigments, once used in some of the world’s earliest and most enduring artworks, carry a deep material history—rooted in ritual, craft, and reverence for the natural world. The silk, luxurious yet delicate, becomes a vessel not just for color, but for memory—shimmering with echoes of both ancient practices and personal exploration.

The process resists total control, giving space for accidents, bleeding edges, and organic movement. In this way, the paintings mirror larger ecological and emotional truths: that what is most beautiful is often also most vulnerable. The work asks us to consider what we preserve, what we inherit, and how we carry forward the traditions of making and meaning in an increasingly unstable world.

Utopalypse doesn’t ask us to choose between hope and loss. Instead, it suggests that both exist simultaneously. In an era of synthetic saturation and environmental detachment, Utopalypse is both a reflection and a rupture: a dreamscape touched by the apocalypse of disconnection, and a gentle reclamation of the primal relationship between art, earth, and the human hand. The utopian impulse—toward wholeness, toward peace— is not extinguished by the awareness of collapse, it’s deepened by it. These works invite the viewer to feel that complexity: a moment of beauty caught in the act of becoming something else.

Wolf holds a BA in Art History from UCLA and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. A lifelong California resident, she has exhibited widely and has collaborated with William Turner Gallery since her first solo show in 2004.

JENNIFER WOLF: UTOPALYPSE

JUNE 21 - AUGUST 16, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 21, 2025

MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD - RE/DEFINED - Opening at the IAAM, Charleston, SC on June 12, 2025

On Thursday, June 12th at 6 pm the International African American Museum, (Charleston, SC)  is hosting Blackness re/Defined | An Evening of Art & Conversation (IAAM Community) a special celebration marking the public opening of our newest special exhibition, re/Defined: Creative Expressions of Blackness from the Diaspora. 

This dynamic evening will explore the transformative role of Black artists and cultural producers in shaping identity, resisting systemic erasure, and redefining Blackness across generations and geographies. Through conversation and performance, the IAAM will examine how creative expression serves as both a reflection of lived experience and a powerful assertion of agency within the African Diaspora.

The evening will feature a live jazz performance, a curated dialogue between artists and scholars, and exclusive curator-led exhibition tours with Suzanne DiBella and Isabelle Britto. Curator-led tours will begin at 6:00 pm and 6:30 pm with the Music & Conversation Program beginning at 7:00 pm.

Mark Steven Greenfield, Dessalines, 2022, AcrlYic and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 20" X 16"

RE/DEFINED

14 Wharfside Street — Charleston, SC 29401
843-872-5352