Erin Milez (b. 1994) grew up in Chicago and has split her adult years between Seattle and the New York City area. She earned her BA in Studio Art from Seattle Pacific University and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2021; she is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and featured in Art Maze Mag Issue 26. She currently lives and works in Bayonne, NJ with her husband and daughter.
From the claustrophobic discord of quarantine to overwhelming joy of creating new life, the couples in Milez's work are living through experiences from her own life and filtered through a language of dance and compression. They are duet partners and day laborers, wrapping around each other with thick limbs and rubberized joints, contorting into and away from each other.
Their compressed domestic space brings both clumsiness and humor to the realities of daily life in sharing and creating a home. At times they illustrate the synchronous unity that might be expected from a long term relationship, and at times tripping over the other in a moment of broken empathy. Their intimacy is joyful and awkward. It is a battle through the difficult moments to create a home.
Their work argues for the significance of everyday life and that the menial tasks required by it are not mundane but a tether to creation.
Images: Erin Milez, Splitting Headache, 2022 (detail). © Erin Milez. Portrait Erin Milez. Courtesy the artist and Monya Rowe Gallery
