Michael Milano is an artist and curator in Seattle, WA. He received a MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was recently included in Even Thread [has] A Speechat John Michael Kohler Art Center, WI.
For more information, please see: www.michaelmilano.net and on Instagram @_michaelmilano.
Michael Milano, untitled (01.07-01.31), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 38 x 32 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
Michael Milano, untitled (01.07-01.31) (detail), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 38 x 32 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
I am incredibly lucky to be healthy, to still have some employment, to have shelter, to live with my partner and my dog. My studio is at my house, and we have had an incredibly beautiful spring here in Seattle. So, to the best of my ability, I am trying to practice gratitude. But the emotional arc of any given day is quite sharp, quickly moving from anger and frustration, to joy and hope, often ending in exhaustion. Though, I am currently finding tremendous amounts of hope in the protests for racial justice.
Michael Milano, untitled (12.20-01.10), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 28 x 25 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
Michael Milano, untitled (12.20-01.10) (detail), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 28 x 25 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
It's my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
My studio practice is largely a solo endeavor, so the quarantine has not really disrupted that experience. However, I am definitely missing the social aspects of being part of an arts community; i.e. gallery openings, studio visits, casual conversations with artists and arts workers, etc. I am part of an artist-run exhibition space called Specialist; while we have had to suspend exhibitions since the outbreak, we have turned over our space to artists to have socially distanced residencies in the gallery. Also, my partner Elisabeth Smith and I run an exhibition space out of our house, well technically our refrigerator/freezer, called Seattle Freezer; it too has been placed on hiatus for in person exhibitions, though there are some virtual programs in the works.
Installation view, works and days, 2019. Specialist, Seattle, WA. Photo: Laura Hart Newlon.
Installation view, works and days, 2019. Specialist, Seattle, WA. Photo: Laura Hart Newlon.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I would describe my work as fiber-adjacent. I am primarily interested in time and labor, and the way these two forces overlap and interact. For this reason, textile traditions have been a particularly rich area to investigate, since they often rely on rhythm and repetition, as well as manual dexterity. I have been interested in labor, specifically craft, as a way to evidence time, and as a way to think about world-making. I have explored notions of time through various forms of physical and intellectual labor, as well as by employing indexicality to simultaneously evidence presence and absence.
For example, a recent body of work stems from studying textile processes––specifically shibori and batik––and willfully misusing this knowledge to combine the hand-labor of traditional resist dyeing techniques with a historic photochemical process known as cyanotype. For these works, cloth is prepared by stitching, binding, and applying wax to resist the photographic chemicals. After exposure to the sun and removal of the embroidered threads, the photographic process produces an index––a trace of where the stitching had once been. The stitch resist cyanotypes aim to evoke time: exhibiting the slow accretion of marks on a surface––hand-stitching as a display of time and labor at a human scale––while photography presents the singular event of exposure, binding light and time onto a surface to create an index.
Michael Milano, untitled (12.13-01.14), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 34 x 28 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
Michael Milano, untitled (12.13-01.14) (detail), 2019. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 34 x 28 in. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit.
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
I am currently making work that investigates non-productive labor and passive production. For example, I have been filling books with chewing gum as I work my way through them. I have also made a video “collaborating” with the colony of ants that live in and around my studio. And I am figuring out ways to set up processes that passively make work, while I am doing other things.
I want to reconsider the centrality of work or labor in our culture; I want to critique the Protestant work ethic, and dismantle the work/leisure dialectic; I want to make a case for diminishing the time spent laboring in our culture––and in my own practice––in order to make more room for other forms of pleasure. I have been moving in this direction slowly over the last year or two, but our current condition has made thinking though these ideas more urgent.
Michael Milano, untitled history, 2020. Book, Big Red chewing gum. 8 1/2 x 6 x 3 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Michael Milano, untitled pleasure, 2020. Book, bubble gum. 8 1/2 x 6 x 1 3/4 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Michael Milano, untitled time, 2020. Book, peppermint chewing gum. 8 1/2 x 6 x 3 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
What do you think or hope will be different after this crisis has passed?
It seems that many of us have a little more time these days, so I hope that we will take this as an opportunity to pause, reflect, and reevaluate. I hope we will decide that racial and economic inequality is an unacceptable foundation for a society, and that universal health care is a human right. I hope that we will decide that we spend too much of our finite lives laboring for wages. I hope that we will seek and build better institutions for our culture and economy, ones that actually serve everyone.
Michael Milano, company (video still), 2020. Color video with sound. Duration 7:54 min. Image courtesy of the artist.
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment? What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling? What are you reading?
I recently finished This Life by Martin Hägglund; The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks; and have been reading some poetry, specifically Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin. I am currently reading Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr., and Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
Michael Milano, untitled (09.26-11.18), 2018. Stitch resist cyanotype on cloth. 22 x 25 in. Image courtesy of the artist.