Adam Milner: If digging something up makes it true, what does burying do? | Project Room
Milner’s deeply personal practice attempts to reconcile the things in his life through gestures of clinging, containing, combining, and releasing.
Returning for his third solo exhibition with David B. Smith Gallery, Denver-born, Brooklyn-based artist Adam Milner continues his dialog with the various ways we keep and let go of the things around us. Milner’s deeply personal practice attempts to reconcile the things in his life through gestures of clinging, containing, combining, and releasing.
If digging something up makes it true, what does burying do? features a series of ceramic wall sculptures which incorporate personal mementos and artifacts. Drawing upon display systems of the home, museum, and store, Milner carefully brings items into dialogue with each other and gives attention to their support structures. The locks of hair of strangers, given to the artist during previous exhibitions, hang from ceramic hooks. 3D-printed steel wishbone fragments carefully rest on tiny shelves. A full moon, sculpted from life and cast in plaster, takes over one assemblage.
Scaled to American letter sized paper (8.5 x 11 inches), Milner’s works speak to the familiarity of standard formatting and its automatic intelligibility. The ceramic tablets position themselves as documents, whether they be love letters or contracts, and create a new system of value through collected fragments. In his ongoing investigation into the poetics of archiving and arranging, potentially overlooked items are thoughtfully reappraised and granted new dignity.
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Adam Milner, Tablet which is connected to the other one even when they are apart, 2019
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Adam Milner, Tablet which prompted someone to tell me that when you break something, now you have two, 2019
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Adam Milner, Tablet in which the moon takes over, as it often does, 2019
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Adam Milner, Favorite tablet, 2019
