JODI MILLER - What Colour is the Sky?
Reception: Saturday May 9, 2-4PM
May 9 - June 13
You are warmly invited to join us on Saturday May 9th for the opening of What Colour is the Sky?, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Saskatoon‑based landscape painter Jodi Miller. Through expansive skies, textured fields, and atmospheric brushwork, Miller’s work offers a space for pause, memory, and belonging.
In her first solo exhibition at The Gallery / art placement inc., Jodi Miller presents a compelling series of landscape works that draw deeply from the physical and emotional terrain of the prairies. What Colour is the Sky? is both a meditation on memory and a celebration of place—capturing textured fields and dusty gravel roads, shifting light and colour, and the vast skies that define the Saskatchewan experience.
Working in acrylic on canvas, Miller layers gestural brushwork with soft, atmospheric colour to create expansive scenes that hover between reality and memory. Conjured from feeling and remembrance, she combines layers of drawing with broad impasto strokes and wispy washes of colour to produce paintings that evoke the quiet stillness of open spaces, the colourful drama of weather, and the subtle pull of horizon lines. Grounding viewers in a particular time and place, Miller often fills the foregrounds of her pictures with thick staccato strokes that capture the texture and movement of prairie grasses and crops. As the landscape recedes, her edges become softer, less fixed, more intangible. Features and forms become hazy and blurred, dissolving into patches of softly blended colour. The landscape, like memory and feeling, becomes obscured by distance, faint yet familiar, material yet just beyond reach.
Rooted in personal experience and informed by Saskatchewan’s rich tradition of landscape painting, Jodi Miller’s work reflects a profound connection to land and sky. These are not literal portraits of place, but emotional landscapes: visual reflections of memory, belonging, relationships, the passage of time, and the enduring imprint of the places we call home. What Colour is the Sky? offers viewers a space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the quiet, comforting elegance of the prairie horizon–not just as a location, but as a living presence, a familiar vista that bridges past and present.
Artist Statement
I paint landscapes from memory. When I begin sketching in graphite, I allow memories of my childhood on the farm and perhaps more importantly, the people I loved, to fill the canvas. These recollections guide the forms that emerge, grounding the landscape in personal history and emotional connection.
My paintings are built in layers, much like the stories we share to hold onto our past. Large brushes create gestural marks that bring the skies into focus, as it is there that I feel most connected to loved ones and to memories of time spent together. Using palette knives, I add and subtract paint across the land, referencing the richness of our stories and the way we sometimes need to peel back layers to remember why they matter.
Many of my paintings are finished with subtle metallic paints that appear only in certain light like the shimmer of a forgotten memory returning. I want people to feel at home in my work, to find places where they can celebrate their own memories and hold onto hope.
-Jodi Miller
