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.