Alli Miller (b. 1985, New York) is an artist and designer working between Los Angeles and NYC. Alli is a co-founder and member of DADDY, nail technician-life coach at Mutant Salon, frequent collaborator of Trey Burns, and infrequently, curator of Adult Contemporary, a hotline platform for aural art work.

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Cloak and dagger is a term used to refer to situations involving intrigue, espionage, or mystery. In the European sword fighting tradition, the purpose of the cloak is to obscure the presence or movement of the dagger, restrict the movement of the opponent’s weapon and, ultimately, to provide a distraction.

I am distracted — and curious as to the potential destabilization of my productive (“worker”) body. This is a story about Lucky, my *jazz body:* it is integral to the ritual of my practice. Not a girl, not yet a woman; not just a “#win,” not yet a masterpiece. The artist within a state of perpetual adolescence, but conscious of and resistant to an identity prescribed by capital and the valorization of self within a Neoliberal framework.

My overarching concern is of my placement in the economy. I often identify as artist, designer and tastemaker (through a labor of “liking”), but most pertinently as a shapeshifter with a fluctuating presence within and proximal distance to varying mythologies. This multiplicitous identification is inclusive of (and notwithstanding) a space for a productive failure of material and narrative.

My practice begins with an urgent economy of making, deconstruction, and self-destruction by addressing the psychosexual and linguistic aspects of display. It is imbued with a dispossessed erasure identified by failure, collapsed comportment, affect and overall mode of display spun into a sentence of unsavory words. An interrogation of materials and rituals assumed and consumed. An underscoring of the complicity of the audience in viewing such an event. The violent separation of water and oil.