Dan Gunn in conversation with Adam Milner

Fascinated by our complicated relationships to objects, Milner’s practice involves collecting, arranging, and combining various mementos and detritus from domestic life. The resulting sculptures and installations can include everything from flower petals to the artist’s eyelashes, vials of blood, hair, conch shells, deer figurines, or the wax coating on Babybel cheese. “I make sculptures in which bodies are always shifting and merging with each other,” says the artist. “In my work, almost everything is a fragment of something else.” Wary of tidying philosophies, Milner reconsiders our inclination toward accumulation, creating works that are both intimate reflections of the artist’s private life and excavations of how cultural value is assigned and upheld through objects. Milner has staged interventions in institutions such as the Warhol Museum and the Mattress Factory, combining archival material and the artist’s own artifacts to examine the aesthetics of museum displays, retail spaces, and home decor and to highlight the contrasting acts of care, control, exchange, and labor within art institutions. At the Clyfford Still Museum, Milner staged performances in the galleries—shadowing the security guards, considering the paintings in darkness, and spraying vintage perfumes believed to have been worn by Still’s wife, Patricia—in order to examine issues of identity, gender, legacy, and desire.