‘Act Out, Desire Me’
Solo Exhibition by Venn Miles
There’s an unreliable narrator in your own head. Not a liar exactly, but slippery, constantly softening or dramatising. Things shift. Details blur. You remember the feeling before you remember the fact. That’s the problem, and the beauty of compiling a memoir like this. Memory doesn’t sit still long enough to be verified; it flickers like an old lightbulb. It contradicts and reshapes itself. It returns when it wants to. Triggered by something useless, or nothing at all, and suddenly you’re there again, inside it. Watching it unfold with uncomfortable clarity. It’s not always kind, but it’s never empty. There’s something to be grateful for in that.
‘Act Out, Desire Me’ functions as a kind of visual memoir. One that resists linear narrative in favour of fragments, distortions, and afterimages. Venn Miles has recorded psycho-sexual encounters not as they happened, but as they linger: warped by desire, shame, pleasure, and time. The figures refuse stability. They are less portraits than remnants.
Desire is the structuring force. It pulls the body out of coherence and reorganises it according to sensation rather than anatomy. In this way, the paintings reject the idealised nude and instead insist on the lived body-awkward and exposed. There is a kind of tenderness embedded within this distortion, but it remains inherently unstable. Always on the verge of slipping into discomfort. What might initially read as intimate or even beautiful begins to unravel under sustained attention; the longer one looks, the more the image resists idealisation. This shift mirrors the mechanics of memory itself. Memory is not a fixed archive but a reconstructive process.
‘Act Out, Desire Me’ sits in the space between memory and invention, where experience is neither fully true nor entirely fabricated. It’s not accuracy that matters but how deeply something was felt, the intensity of the fossils in your mind. how persistently it returns. Paintings are not documents of events, but of their psychological residue. And who knows if they ever even happened.
Venn Miles - ‘Act Out, Desire Me’
Venn Miles.
From a young age, Venn understood the power of drawing. He learnt to draw because his father could and he saw a magic in being able to explain himself through art.
In the beginning it was a way for Venn to be able to see the world he wanted to see but as he grew and life twisted and became more complex, so did his practice. Venn’s work still holds elements of his childhood imagination but enveloped within is an exposé of a gritty reality. Inspired by everyday people and stories, Venn uses his practice to tell narratives of a mundane ubiquity in the style of an epic tale.
Venn Miles is a self taught visual artist practicing on the Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation (Sydney). Inspired by post modern and political themes, Venn’s practice focuses on figurative and still life subjects. Working in oil, charcoal and ink, Venn’s figurative work challenges notions of the beautiful and the grotesque, pushing beyond the physical human form to represent the soul and psyche.
UPCOMING SOLO EXHIBITION | APRIL 2026 | To enquire please reach out here.
2026 - Solo Exhibition
VENN MILES - SOLO EXHIBITION
ON VIEW | 10 APRIL - 25 APRIL 2026
LOCATION : HAKE, HOUSE OF ART 275 Harbord Road, Dee Why, 2099.
2025 - Sleeping at Night and living With Yourself
PREVIOUS SOLO EXHIBITION 2025
SHOW NOTES;
The Seasons Change and There’s No Forgiveness. Autumn turns a bitter winter and it’s all my fault.
But it couldn’t be my fault,
But it is.
But that’s nature,
But that’s my nature.
Selfishness as a nature is a weapon. Like the antler of elk, It’s a blunt instrument. Dressed up in philosophy. Lacquered with the pretence of wisdom. clumsy but dependable, I swing it around with all the grace of a child. ‘Seek pleasure, avoid pain,’ I mutter, misquoting Epicurus deliberately, as though it were scripture and I, a radical. I had found ecstasy but complained when the hangovers hurt my head. I made a parody of hedonism.
And desire? Desire makes a caricature of you; makes a stranger of you. Epicureanism, twisted in my hands, is a funhouse mirror. It functions here less as a character flaw than as a philosophy in practice, one that bends experience toward itself until both object and subject are destabilised. It stretches you thin, it tears you apart, it remakes you into something unrecognisable.
Sleeping at Night and Living With Yourself enacts a parody of coherence in the same way that selfishness parodies philosophy. Just as Epicureanism is misremembered as a licence for indulgence rather than a pursuit of balance. The painted figures appear to collapse under the weight of their own desires. Limbs are elongated into grotesque extensions, torsos sag into caricature, and expressions hover between anguish and satire - suggesting that pleasure, when pursued without limit, dismantles rather than completes the self.
And yet I obey selfishness like a creed, quoting fragments out of context, as though the shattered glass of a bottle still contained the wine.
Words by Venn Miles
Catalogue; ‘Sleeping at Night and Living With Yourself’ by Venn Miles
2023 - Livingroom Opera
PREVIOUS GROUP EXHIBITION 2023
Show Notes
The premise of Living Room Opera revolves around the interplay between life and art, challenging the conventional notions that the two exist separately.
The exhibition’s purpose is to suggest that life and art share a common fabric, woven with Mistakes and Honesty and Wonder and Villains and Romance and Tedium and Grandeur and Tragedy. Revealing the concealed connections where art and life converge. To really consider the landscapes and vistas before they’re on the canvas, the quiet moments before a still life and who once sat at that table or put the cigarette in the ashtray. The faces that linger in our memories, now in the Living Room Opera.
In regards to work - draw inspiration from the nuances of existence. Themes such as the performative amongst the mundane (think suburbia, the nuclear family with a perfect lawn), the extraordinary in the banal (the natural world), unexpected moments of drama, grandeur in simplicity, and other subtle elements may naturally find their way into your art that refer back to unnoticed magic in everyday life.
- Words by Venn Miles, HAKE.
