With works that contemplate corporeality and shared space between bodies, Milner uses blood, flowers, hair, belly button lint, false eyelashes to close gaps between natural and artificial, human and non-human, inside and outside.

 

The works, comprised of rigorously collected and mined material from himself, friends, strangers, and other living things, collectively ask questions about who or what has a body and how those bodies are organized or collected. The acquisition of many of these materials hinges on complicated social contracts and negotiations, exchanges the artist has chosen to not overtly publish within the exhibition. We see many first names, and thus are let into Milner’s personal relationships, but kept at a distance. Natural history preservation and display methods are conflated with a personal archive of memories and objects, complicating hierarchies of how and why we save things.