Growingrainbows my photographic editing project on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/growingrainbows/?hl=en
When I was twelve, I set about doing what all my friends were doing: Taking selfies. But I wanted more out of the selfie than to see myself as I appeared. I wanted to see how I imagined myself. Using my phone and some basic editing apps, I created pictures that brought together what I could see and what I could imagine into a single frame. I posted them to my Instagram page. It was just for fun.
Then my Instagram account came to the attention of Frank Maresca, who runs an important gallery in Chelsea. He said he couldn’t get the images out of his head. He asked if he could exhibit my photos in a show at his gallery. As a twelve-year-old, I found this a little intimidating, until I found out who else was in the exhibit with me: Warhol, Man Rey, Stieglitz, Weegee and more. Then I found it a lot intimidating. Check out the video about the show:
As things would unfold, the New Yorker sent writer and critic Adam Gopnik to review the show. Here is what Adam Gopnik wrote about my new take on the selfie:
“The most astonishing artist in the show, and perhaps the most significant, is therefore a twelve-year-old girl named Kaia Miller, who is sort of a “Gossip Girl” version of Cindy Sherman. In a permanently running and recycling video, she shows her seemingly infinite collections of manipulated self-portraits: Kaia doubled, Kaia in a dress cleverly made to look like a waterfall (or, rather, “wearing” a waterfall cleverly made to look like a dress), Kaia stroboscopically shown bending on her own bed, with one Kaia bleeding, Muybridge-like, into the next—a Kaia with rose-print hair and a Kaia posed to look like a character on “Pretty Little Liars.” In between these Photoshopped selfies, she talks, effortlessly and energetically and endlessly, about … herself. It is impossible not to admire the energy she puts into her self-creations: the “reinvention” that people used to dutifully admire in Madonna each year Kaia produces every day. And if we feel a little dubious about that much self-reflection, well, Kaia would doubtless agree with Philip Roth that the goal of the artist who writes, or shows, herself is not self-glorification but self-knowledge, even if that knowledge is, as Kaia has learned, that you can always spin out one more self. The relentless appetite for selfies that, in a Kim Kardashian’s hands, is belittled can become, in the hands of someone so much younger and more ingenuous and earnest, a reminder that self-showing is not necessarily selfish. It can be a form of self-accountancy, of diary keeping, of journal making, even a sort of charming ritual of daily inventory. Kaia Miller is that rare thing: an artist entirely at peace with, and in love with, her time. You will be seeing more of her, we bet—almost as much as she will be seeing of herself.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/finding-the-self-in-a-selfie
To say the least, it was a very heady experience and my pictures were selling at $1800 apiece. Having hit my peak as a photographer in the seventh grade, I did what any other artist who was succeeding would do (no, I didn’t cut off my ear), I decided if I was ever going to starve like a truly great artist, I would have to become a painter! Like the photos, the drawings and paintings spring forth from my imagination but unlike the photos that mix reality with imagination, these works are pure immagination. Here is one example:
