Mundane tasks like washing the dishes, eating dinner, or getting some shuteye take on wild and chaotic proportions in Erin Milez’s uncanny paintings. She portrays characters and a home that reflects her own experiences of starting a young family.
Repetitive motifs and overactive hands—their connection to a body often unclear—cultivate a sense of routine, perform chores, and provide affection. “They go about their daily routines like the seasons, repeating on an accelerated 24-hour cycle,” Milez says.
The artist draws on the physically and emotionally transformative experience of parenthood in her solo exhibition Chimera at Monya Rowe Gallery. The title reflects the name of a fire-breathing monster in Greek mythology that was part-lion, part-goat, and part-dragon. The term “chimera” is also sometimes used to describe a grotesque beast or a figment of the imagination. Milez says:
I see my feeling of metamorphosis reflected in various places: in Lucy Jones’ explanation of matrescence and becoming chimeras, “never being singular again,” even on a genetic level; in Tetsuya Ishida’s work, though his embodies a more hopeless and dehumanized transformation in laboring tasks; in Nightbitch where Amy Adams is transformed into a dog because of the primal and physical demands of creation and mothering.
Tetsuya Ishida, for example, is known for portraying humans merged with machines and banal objects in surreal, alienating scenes. Milez also references the physicality and strength depicted WPA-era works, like the laborers’ bodies in murals by Diego Rivera or Stanley Spencer. The latter was known for large-scale depictions of everyday workers like Port Glasgow shipbuilders on the River Clyde, who people rhythmic, heaving scenes of the round-the-clock toil.
In Milez’s paintings, quotidian scenes are reframed into elaborate juggling acts. In many cases, the scenes themselves literally frame the activity, like the green tiled sink in “Hot & Cold” that mirrors a material form with clasped hands. In “Receptacle,” numerous hands, handles, and objects swirl around an unwieldy trash bag, and stuffed wooden compartments overflow with nostalgia in “The Years Are Short.”
Milez illuminates the emotional rollercoaster of parenthood, invoking its discomforts, uncertainties, disorganization, and above all, devotion. In “Goodnight, Lion,” a sleepless mother squishes into a crib to help her chld sleep, evoking wildlife in a zoo.
“Occupying a space somewhere between chaos and nurture, Milez observes the complicated and continually changing dynamics between family members and self,” says a statement for Chimera. “Milez is not afraid to portray the seemingly monstrous, but it is never gratuitous and always mitigated by beauty and reality.”
Chimera continues through March 29 in New York City. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
