Michael Milano

Region: Midwest

As one of the world’s oldest and most ubiquitous technologies, textiles are a ripe locus for the discovery of simple compositions. Whether it involves the piecing of a quilt, the pattern of a jacket, or the seam, fold, or drape of a shirt, it is cloth’s seemingly banal or mundane quality, coupled with its relationship to abstraction, that currently motivates me. My fabric-based constructions are indebted in equal measure to abstraction and textile materials and processes, and my most recent body of work concerns thinking through these materials and processes, using abstraction as a rhetorical space, in order to champion materiality and simplicity. The works reveal their own fabrication while oscillating between image and object. Combining a minimum of processes in these works—folding, stitching, pressing, and piecing—I seek a studied simplicity; I am responsive to the physical properties of the material and sympathetic to their social and historical connotations.