Mia Milgrom↓

Popis diplomové práce

Undercurrents: The Water Drinks Me

Mia Milgrom explores themes of human and non-human care and support systems. Her installations oscillate between fragile moments of decay and the symbiotic relationship between their various parts. By combining organic and synthetic materials, she creates unexpected relationships and alternative possibilities of connection. In Undercurrents: The Water Drinks Me, she uses natural filtration systems as a metaphor for environmental contamination in general and personal cleansing and the process of absorbing grief in particular. The piece closely follows on her previous work, expanding its visual language and material experimentation. At its center are irregularly shaped tears made of crystal and stainless steel and suspended in a site-specific installation that transforms the entire floor space into something like a construction site that reveals the various layers of the Earth through which water naturally filters. Rainwater slowly circulates throughout the installation in a reference to symbiotic cycles, water crises, and the associated corporeality.

In Undercurrents, Milgrom works with a material assemblage that explores new relationships, changing meanings, or metaphors that depend on the position of the observer. The substance communicates with us, helps to shape the environment in which we live, and thus contributes to human and non-human experience. The artist works with the concept of filtration in a highly intuitive manner – in her piece, minerals, water, organic life, and the waste of civilization meet and interact in a fundamental process of maintenance that requires a great deal of time and cooperation. By transcending the duality of organic and inanimate matter, she attempts to bring experiences together, to engage in a kind of speculative game in which metals grow into wood and originally soft materials find themselves in heavy bodies. From classical antiquity until the eighteenth century, minerals and metals were believed to grow underground just like organic matter. In this and similar fictional notions, science blends with poetry and sometimes becomes incomprehensible, while nevertheless offering a vast range of limitless and undogmatic possibilities.