(wind blowing)
(birds tweeting)
[Adam Milner, artist]
(soft ambient music)
I think people would think of me as a collector.
(ambient music continues)
I feel more like I'm just a magnet
and objects are just flying at me all the time
and then I have to then deal with them.
(ambient music continues)
[Adam Milner Takes Care of the Details]
My artworks are always intermingling with personal stuff.
So I turned to tidying philosophies or home decor TV shows.
A lot of these philosophies are about getting rid of things,
but I'm really interested in this idea of vibrant matter
or this idea that everything is active--
and how when we're done with something,
it still exists in the world.
Immediately I think of trash, and I love trash.
(upbeat synth music)
I will just walk around the neighborhood and look at trash.
(upbeat synth music continues)
A spilled bag of Cheetos on the sidewalk
is a stunning composition
that I have to take a photo of.
(camera clicking)
And then I come home and I start to use
something I learned from those Cheetos in the work.
I find their accidental compositions to be really exciting.
(clanging)
I like the flattening that happens in thrift stores
where there's functional things next to artworks
next to things that seem worthless.
(glass tinkling)
I get a lot of ideas and a lot of materials
and a lot of objects from the people in my life.
When my friend Jen from high school
wanted me to cut off all her hair and keep it,
it felt like a weird trophy.
Now I've lived with that hair and protected it
and cared for it for longer than it was on her head.
So is it my hair now?
Even as I approach something out of hair
or closeness with a person,
there's also kind of a domination or a control.
It's always going to be Jen's hair,
but it's now also been in the Warhol museum.
(piano synth music)
I'm realizing that arranging
is kind of my primary discipline.
I made this sculpture
with these little things I had collected,
and then I carved these stones
that I would find to hold them.
I think some of the items are safer in the stones
than they were before.
(ethereal synth music)
It needs just a little bit of yellow, actually.
(water running)
(water dripping)
The exhibition I'm working on right now
is with a museum called Black Cube.
(ethereal synth music)
We're showing thirteen sculptures at a thrift store, a bodega,
one sculpture is in my friend's car.
This exhibition is about letting these objects
have these temporary contexts that change how you read them
and maybe help you access them,
and that aren't just this white cube environment.
(quiet violin music)
Sometimes at an art museum,
the brackets that are hand painted to look like marble,
those hand-painted brackets are more exciting to me
even than the bust.
They're trying to disappear,
but then they become even more conspicuous
through this careful labor.
(ambient violin music)
A museum has its own rules of organization and display
just like the store or the archive or the hoard.
I'm interested in teasing out the similarities among them,
disrupting that hierarchy a little bit.
(drill running)
I have a really fraught relationship with my things,
and I realize that I'm, basically, defending the hoarder.
With hoarding, you do blur with your stuff.
Your body becomes part of the hoard.
(ethereal synth music)
I think everything is porous,
and everything is always absorbing the thing next to it.
(ethereal music continues)
If it's confusing where things begin and end,
it's a lot harder to divide and segment.
I'm always trying to resist the clean category.
I like when things are messier and blurrier.
(ethereal music continues)
(soft guitar music)