Adam Milner: Meanwhile

About

Everything begins with an egg. And the egg is a void. I think of the Clarice Lispector short story, “The Egg and The Chicken,” and the lucid yet madcap succession of these lines: “In the morning in the kitchen on the table I see the egg…Immediately I perceive that one cannot be seeing an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the present.” Invisibility with infinite capacity. 

I don’t know if Adam has thought of capacity as one of the materials in this work. The artist’s idiosyncratic collecting, reconfiguring, and contextualizing of found objects questions how we live and engage with the items around us. Time, order, and subject are mutable. A cigarette contains a world. I can see it lit, between lips, alone with another in the pack, and ground under a heel, part of a narrative where the action unfolds through immeasurable duration. Tangible fragments and accumulated detritus become physical expressions of intimacy, perhaps even transgression.

A red rose buds and blooms; cigarettes and eggs split. The environment created by the artist is one of asides and interludes. The power—and emotional sleight of hand—comes from the peripheral. These things exist, even in rooms you cannot see, living on tabletops or forgotten under furniture. The studio is transient and preconceived assumptions of display are revocable. Dust (mostly) prevents itself from settling. 

There is something so alien about an egg and its ability to obscure itself, that looping and overlapping of absence and presence. Milner plays with appearances, of being in the thing and outside of the thing. Desire is there too, a scrim of residue asking us if we want to become whole. 

—Colleen Kelsey, February 2025