ONE MAN’S TRASH Miller has nabbed everything from valuable artwork to weird weight-loss devices in alleys.

You’d be hard pressed to find another person who’s taken Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal presented as a piece of art) as literally as Joe Miller. Inspired by the “whole readymade spiel…the idea of taking something, removing it from its original context and changing its function,” the 30-year-old education aide and after-school art teacher dragged a stranger’s nonfunctioning toilet from the alley into his Rogers Park house, thinking he could make something from it.

That was nine years ago, when Miller brought home pretty much anything. At the time, he had just moved from Beaumont, Texas, to study photography at Columbia College. Living in Rogers Park with nothing but a futon on the floor and plenty of time to kill before starting school, he found himself wandering through his neighborhood’s alleys. In addition to providing fodder for his found-art sculptures and furniture for his empty home, “it was an interesting cultural study to see what people got rid of.”

Growing up in a household filled with antique odds and ends (thanks to his mom’s avid collecting)—from a hat stretcher and a collection of wooden gears to a three-pronged frog-stabber (allegedly used to kill frogs)—Miller naturally acquired a taste for the aesthetic of antiquated materials. As a kid, he had no choice but to follow his mom into every antique shop they stumbled upon, and by the age of 15 he started thrifting for vintage clothing on his own.

It wasn’t until he moved to Chicago and discovered the city’s alleys were “like one big junk shop…a storehouse of potential,” that he began scavenging through them. The casual hobby quickly evolved into an integral part of his everyday routine: choosing alleys over streets for any commute by bike or by foot, ducking out during lunch breaks to go hunting, and peeking down side streets during road trips. At one point, Miller used found materials—wooden skis, a door frame, velvet theater curtains, pieces of an old piano—to cobble together an entire wall to section off an attic bedroom of his Palmer Square apartment. His only limitation was what he could carry with him (a problem he’s recently solved by attaching a trailer to his bike). Still, he’s managed to sling a coffee table over his shoulder, balance a side table on his handlebars and hang an assortment of metal sign letters on the frame of his bike to take home.

Within the past few years, with some encouragement from his live-in girlfriend, Miller has developed the habit of “purging as well as bingeing.” He looks at the alleys with a more discriminating eye; namely, he’s on the lookout for objects he can reincarnate.

Employing a combination of skills he acquired in design and woodworking classes and fiddling around on his own, Miller spends most of his spare time (when he’s not in the alleys) constructing “hobo-chic” furniture and found-art sculptures and collages. The materials echo their original form but take on a new function.

In addition to Duchamp, he references the collage paintings by artist Robert Rauschenberg (who coincidentally hailed from a neighboring town in Texas) and the Western settlers’ sod houses as influences in both the practice and aesthetic of his designs. He recently sold his first piece of furniture—a side table made from legs from a found table and a dresser drawer filled with TV tubes arranged on a canvas “like a specimen display”—to a friend.

“It is like treasure hunting,” Miller says. “You get a lot of really great surprises. They might not be complete, but it keeps you on your toes.”

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