Object Lessons
Installation view of Adam Milner: Meanwhile. Photos by Marc Tatti. Courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN Gallery.
In the material world, you can only consider an object from so many angles at once. The world of images presents unlimited simultaneous dimensions—views on objects flattened into forms, floating in perpetuity, torn from first principles, and embedded in an infinite deracinated scroll.
Meanwhile, at RAINRAIN Gallery, Adam Milner’s objects contend with the images of themselves. They prescribe a few suggestions. You can look at them one by one—or, in this arrangement, at more or less the same time.
The image, which contains a suspension of objects, can be stretched over the grid of representative meaning. Description gestures at the grid: the disembodied network. The grid makes itself apparent where paint (Left Behind) catches on the edges of the structure underneath.
Against the grid, suggestions are codified into prescriptions. This painting is site-specific in that it was made to conform to the parameters of its place in the real world: its dimensions dictated by the height of the artist’s studio doors, its composition by the way the gallery light (above the upper left corner of the image, directly out of frame) would fall on the curve of a theoretical egg. Though the egg never materializes past Milner’s interior world of forms, it establishes a yolky tone.
Eggs are sites of potential; they imply their own interior worlds. There are a lot of eggs in the show. The motif is clear and sort of tremulous, like a single note sent out—the egg that never was—a structure, slippage, a shadow form. In its place is a hard-lined directional spotlight pointing up to a dish of referents. It’s like a Yoshitomo Nara ashtray with the constituent images translated back into material life, the liquid suggestions in their prescriptive shells smashed up and rearranged in new relations.
The real world privileges experience over interpretation. To make an omelette—you know.
Adam Milner, Meanwhile Assortment (2011–25). Dimension variable. Photos by Marc Tatti. Courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN Gallery.
(On the topic of potential and interior worlds—this is an unboxing.)
None of the boxes on the shelf are empty. Their material contents are non-public public information: suggested but not entirely accessible, like a password-protected hyperlink or an open secret. From the outside you might guess at the insides, but only Milner—and, in some cases, gallerist Rain Lu—can shepherd you through the confirmation process, which reveals a series of intimate, indefinite objects with their own nested meanings.
(These are not facts to be so easily described but possibilities to be gestured at. Something is lost in representing these details so clearly.)
You don’t know the meaning of objects just by looking at them.
Adam Milner, Red Drawings (2020–25). Ink and gesso on wrappers, aluminum frames. Photos by Marc Tatti. Courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN Gallery.
The forms are flattened, tossed-off like drawings in the margins of a document. The materials are marginal: shells produced by daily living patterns. The placement of the work around the room is marginal but crucial, like that of a frame.
Ephemera is a timeline, a record of collection. Milner experimented with the illuminated food wrappers, scattering them across the gallery walls like runes or discrete mathematical symbols. In their final iteration, they condense into straight lines reflecting light, directing a horizontal narrative scroll back and forth.
Prescriptions emerge from suggestions in the margins, where they show you how to look.
Adam Milner, Untitled (2015–25). Dimension variable. Photos by Marc Tatti. Courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN Gallery.
The modes of collection by which images are arranged originate on the plane of experience.
It is not just about material composition. Objects are permeable, reflective, and reflexive. In an ecosystem of objects, arrangements determine relative value. There are links to the outside world, real classifications: repeated forms, hierarchies of height, visible names. There are patterns—pale, miniature, marine—that emerge from inside.
The pieces are arranged over a structure; set against it, they curate themselves into tiers. It is like a mood board. Networks of meaning shift objects into place.
Installation view of Adam Milner: Meanwhile. Photos by Marc Tatti. Courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN Gallery.
In objects, Milner recreates his references—a photograph of Patricia Still in a pink suit from his work with Clyfford Still’s archives—a study in networks of meaning, relation, context, and connection. Images come to mimic and predict life; they suggest it, they represent it, they refine it; they are pulled apart into components and pushed into materiality, translated between dimensions, in both directions, from every angle at the same time.
Adam Milner’s solo exhibition Meanwhile is on view through April 5 at RAINRAIN Gallery, New York.
Edited by Xuezhu Jenny Wang
