Shala Miller’s Tender Noted

“It was March of 2017 when I noticed that I usually wake up to find evidence of some kind of fight on my skin. Scratches, ranging in size and color, found with and sometimes without blood.” Those are Shala Miller’s opening lines to her first monograph, Tender Noted. I need my two hands to hold the book. The soft craft cover embraces my touch with its smoothness. My fingers are met with the indent of a collage-like pasted image in the middle of the cover, a small rectangular photograph of a figurine of a Black girl jumping rope on an oval pedestal. The girl’s skirt, sneakers, and socks are white. So is the rope. The rope appears fragmented, broken—or perhaps it is the contrast of the photograph sharpening the rope’s movement and depth, obstructing part of it. While I look at the girl on the cover, the book’s broad backbone rests in my palm. The spine is paved with bold red uppercase letters in a round serif font. The red letters glow, rooting themselves in the surface of the brown spine. Letters as scratches, as etchings, marking the book’s wrapping as Miller’s body was marked by those mystery evidences of fight tiling her skin in the spring of 2017. With the book in my palms, I understand I am holding something much larger than simple printed matter, a memorabilia of Miller’s body, a personified testimony to her becoming.

Tender Noted is intimately sized, an alternative to the expected large format of the anthology or the art monograph. The side of each page is tinted in fluorescent orange. The dye has slightly started bleeding onto the matte craft cover of my copy. The bleeding is evidence of the invisible movement that seems to occur within Tender Noted. The book’s layout makes for a slower, paced reading: blank pages in between bodies of work act as an opportunity to take a breath, to reset, like an act change in a play. For example, the sequencing of Mourning Chorus reveals a film form rather than that of a book — two still images show close-ups of Miller’s body, translating her sequence to the black page. The images are accompanied by subtitles across the bottom: “In this poem the sun does not shine”; “Girl be careful how you choose them I’m talking ’bout the ones you ask to soothe your bruises”; “’Cause they’ll keep adding to the count”; and on the next page “I’m breaking down”; “[police sirens in the background].” All the words appear across Miller’s body in light and shadows. The page following this series is blank, facing a page with a photograph of the broad dark back of a man stretching his arms up, printed full bleed to the orange tips of the page. His back appears marked, echoing Miller’s “mystery evidences” from the prologue. Surrounding his back is white sky with ink-filled leaves. It is tender. On the next page is a note: “Every Lover Is a Watermelon Seed; Honor my backside and call the doctor.” Miller is guiding us. As if we were able to look through her mind, she offers the ultimate sequence for the movie of her body, the movie of her life, and inherently, her legacy.

Miller’s pairings of color, texture, and image size indicate the different rooms of her practice: the play between light and dark in high-contrast, monochromatic film stills and photographs, the use of matte paper, the blank pages as breathing room for images and text. The white pages are mostly filled with words; as different acts, they have a different tone, often operating within the space of the enacted rather than the journaled, which inhabits the black pages of the book. There is a call and response between the soft, self-reflective space of the pages of images and the raw space on which minimalist round serif dark brown type and wide empirical ‘o’s are boldly laid. I have not often, if ever, encountered a book transcending the space of the page to inhabit lands of play and rooms. I am dazzled by Miller’s bridge between the monograph and the traveling body, a house of stories. Hers mostly resembles the story on screen and the body on stage, rather than being limited to the ones on the page.

I have seen Miller perform in New York a few times. She is often wearing a bright tube top in a similar color to the dye bordering the pages of her book, and a pair of lustered shoes. She carries herself, humble, strong, and transcendent, absolutely glimmering, inhabited with intentionality. The distinct semiotics of Tender Noted, such as its fluorescent orange page borders, its deep brown type, and the textured matte paper, all set a captivating stage that hosts Miller’s performances. However, the book is a more intimate space than the theater, and so it acts as an itinerant window rather than a direct projector.Tender Noted is a bulb, projecting light in ode to the form of film and theater that paves Miller’s practice. While it is a book of hybrid investigation, “a relentless chorus,” as Miller writes, it contains a celebration of beauty, wounds, and silences. Slightly larger than a bible in size, but as spiritual and deep as a book of prayers, Tender Noted is a monograph of plural light.