The Miracle Mile was a year long performance by Vancouver based artist Jamie Hilder. Hilder trained for a full year to run a mile in 4 minutes. He documented himself and his progress by daily photographs and journal entries. His entries detail his exercise routine, diet, what music he was listening to while training, as well as his personal thoughts. Each entry was accompanied by a picture showing the gradual physical changes in his body while training.
The exhibition was installed in the Charles H Scott Gallery. I was fortunate enough to visit the exhibition while it was running. I was impressed by the degree to which his durational performance was documented. In addition to the year's worth of journal entries posted all over gallery the walls, he also incorporated time based documentation. This documentation included a time lapse of his daily portraits, videos of him training, and his attempt at the 4 minute mile on the last day. I was fascinated by the artists discipline to train rigorously for an entire year. The Miracle Mile extends art into the everyday ritual and documents human determination and ability to make change through a change in habits.
Hilder is an emerging contemporary artist as well as a critic and poet. He has a background in English and is currently pursuing his PhD at UBC. His past work deals with navigations through urban and suburban environments. This past summer he engaged in a collaboration with Brady Cranfield (a sound instructor at Emily Carr) in the Artspeak exhibition "Island Developments: Utopia's Adrift", which examines the utopian/disutopian pardox.
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