Please join me for…
A reading of three new fables by Adam Milner.
Followed by a conversation with Dan Gunn, on the closing weekend of The Ungrateful Son at GEARY.
Saturday, July 27th, 4-5pm
GEARY
34 Main Street
Millerton, NY 12546
Adam Milner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Working across sculpture and installation, Milner investigates and recontextualizes the objects of the home, the hoard, the museum, and the body, questioning the boundaries and hierarchies that rule these domains. 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.
Dan Gunn is an artist, writer, and educator in Connecticut. He received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 where he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor. He was awarded residencies at the Wassaic Project (2022), University of Arkansas (2019), Anderson Ranch Art Center (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2015), and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Sawyer (2023) at KMAC Contemporary Museum and of the land behind them (2022) at Monique Meloche Gallery. Recent group shows include The Regional at the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati (OH) and the Kemper Museum of Art Kansas City (MO), With a Capital P at the Elmhurst Art Museum (IL) and Matter Matters at the University of Missouri Kansas City (MO). Other venues have included the Elephant Gallery (TN), University of Toledo, (OH), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Marine Contemporary (Santa Monica), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), the Poor Farm (WI), and the Loyola University Museum of Art (Chicago). His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, Frieze, Art in America, Artforum.com, art ltd., Artslant.com, Newcity Magazine, New American Paintings, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune.