Catherine Miller: Art, technology… and cats

If you’ve spent a lot of time on the inter­net, par­tic­u­lar­ly social media sites and Buz­zfeed arti­cles, you may be famil­iar with the cat beard trend.

For Cather­ine Miller, her intro­duc­tion to cat beard­ing came at a piv­otal moment in her life.

Some­thing about the sil­ly inter­net images stuck. Miller spent hours look­ing through peo­ple’s pic­tures with their cats (and dogs), find­ing the fun­ni­est ones.

“I laughed so hard, my face hurt, my stom­ach hurt,” she said. “And then I start­ed draw­ing them.”

Miller, a 29-year-old artist born and raised in Port­land, has been an artist all her life. As a child, she immersed her­self in the col­or­ful world of crayons (“not just the cray­on itself, but the wrap­per, too”) and was nev­er with­out a col­or­ing book. Her school­ing was all in art and she has curat­ed a num­ber of exhibits through­out Port­land in a vari­ety of media — paints, sculp­ture, water­col­or, sketch­ing. She’ll work in what­ev­er medi­um feels best suit­ed to a piece, she said, but “if I’m want­i­ng to feel relaxed or feel at home, it’s always with a brush.”

Her art has large­ly includ­ed the same theme. Miller is visu­al­ly impaired (she’s legal­ly blind), and is in fact the first visu­al­ly-impaired artist to grad­u­ate from the Pacif­ic North­west Col­lege of Arts. Since grad­u­a­tion, she has used her work to point out how the fine arts can often fail to cater to dis­abled patrons, and worked to make the fine arts world more inclu­sive. In 2011, she curat­ed an exhib­it called ‘A Some­what Secret Place,’ meant to high­light art cre­at­ed by and for those with dis­abil­i­ties.

She’s been obses­sive­ly draw­ing cat memes from the inter­net since last June.

“Late­ly I’ve switched from just cat beards to inter­net-famous felines, so I’ve been work­ing on hip­ster kit­ty and dub­step kit­ty a lot this week,” she said. “It’s great. I find that I real­ly con­nect with peo­ple that way.”

She sees an impor­tant inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and, of course, cats. And that inter­sec­tion is with art.

“The job of an artist, real­ly, is to point the gaze of soci­ety at some­thing,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been draw­ing these images. That is, I’m not say­ing it’s great or it’s not great. It is. This is. And per­haps more impor­tant than you were think­ing.”