Why I Love This Art features museum employees, volunteers, and interns talking about art they love from the exhibitions at MCA Denver. Here Director of Programming Sarah Kate Baie writes about Adam Milner's Beds series, on view as part of the exhibition Continental Drift from July 13 – Sept 23, 2012.
Adam Milner takes a photo of his bed, or wherever it was he slept, every morning when he wakes up. A series of these photographs appears in the exhibition Continental Drift (on view from July 13 – September 23, 2012). The photos show sixteen of his, err, sleeping arrangements. Adam’s disheveled single bed appears in several of the photos, pushed up against the wall, bedclothes assembled with an
assortment of sheets and pillows. But sometimes he sleeps other places. In one bed, a picture of a baby is prominently placed on a sleek modern headboard. In another, a flowery bedspread matches elaborate curtains. In a few, someone else lingers under the covers – a tuft of dark hair giving them away.
Adam’s pictures appeal to me because they remind me of the freedom of youth, while at the same time almost unwittingly showing the gritty underside of being young and at loose ends. It’s sexy to sleep somewhere new each night. But it’s messy too.
Looking at these photos, I recognize a touch of my reckless younger self in Adam’s untidy sheets and covers. At age twenty life for me was untidy – and not just my bed. But I am also reminded of how much things change. If, like Adam, I took a photograph of each place I slept now, the results would be laughably boring. I hope this is a sign of my success.
Adam Milner’s Beds telegraph so much personal information through the most commonplace of objects. I don’t know Adam Milner, though I feel as if I do. His photographs in Beds make me care about him. I wonder what he's like – and what he will be like in ten years, where he will be sleeping. I hope he continues his photo diary. For me,his pictures are a time machine into not only his life, but into my own as well. I love this art.
Image Credit: Adam Milner. Beds (March 17, 2011), 2009-ongoing. Images from archive, printed on rag paper, 18 x 27 in. Courtesy the artist.
2 comments:
Sarah, I love this. Now I wonder what Adam is like; where his life will take him. Will the messiness of beds, changeable and not always predictable, follow him? Or will they too be reformed into a consistent and safe parade of sameness as he ages? I almost hope he revisits the series every decade from now, documenting the changing beds that follow through his life.
Well my bed room is always look messy like that.
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