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Miller & Shellabarger use gunpowder and black oil sunflower seeds to outline their bodies and hands. Both materials hold immense amounts of energy, even when distilled into diminutive containers, and are utilized for their rich metaphorical connotation. One is used to feed the flame. The other is left as feed. Each poured out to trace their forms, each consumed and gone like the bodies they once traced. The flash of gunpowder produces an afterimage, visible not when closing one's eyes, but sprawled out across paper. A silhouette of figures that are both physically present and absent, are fixed by fire. The explosive marks of smoke and flame trace that which is gone. A line drawn from life to preserve a fleeting moment, that line a reminder of what is gone. That line consumed by fire is again gone. The seed drawings are as impermanent as the corporal bodies they outline. Often executed outside the drawing, the seeds are simply left to let nature take its course. The seed drawings in Again Gone will be left to the forces of entropy. Periodically Miller & Shellabarger will gather the sunflower seeds from the existing drawings to make new ones.

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