Miler Lagos

Miler Lagos - González-Torres's rings "is just a matter of time"

Técnica: Collage made with newspaper

Biografía del Artista: The work of Miler Lagos is born from his extensive and incisive experimentation with different materials and how these have detonated central questions that permeate and nourish his work. One of his main searches has been the relationship between images and objects, in some way between content and container. This is how paper leads to images and from images to the passage of time and from the passage of time to the archive, to memory, to the physical and visual witness of culture; and in the midst of working with paper as a container, thanks to an accident while he was carving it with an angle grinder, the paper returned to its natural condition, that of a tree. This fortuitous encounter allows us to see his diverse interests, which are mostly found at the intersection of nature and culture, in how humans have shaped their space or have been shaped by environmental/geographical conditions, by rivers, lagoons, trees, mountains and how we gradually convert nature into a resource to inhabit, into raw material, into just a vehicle. It is precisely at this point where his exploration with materials transforms these concerns and the matter is able to reveal its essence. He has participated in the Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador; Open Art Orebro, Sweden; SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico, USA; Havana, Cuba; TRIENNIAL POLI/GRÁFICA San Juan, Puerto Rico; Biennial of the Americas, Denver, USA; VIII Biennial of Bogotá, Colombia. His work has also been exhibited in institutions such as: Frost Art Museum, Miami, USA; Museo de la Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Museo de Arte del Banco de la Republica. Bogotá, Colombia; Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Mexico; Gasworks, London, UK; Claremont Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia; York University Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, Spain. His work is found in collections such as MUAC Museo de Arte Universidad Autónoma de Mexico; Harvard University; Banco de la Replública de Colombia; Rubell Family Collection and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO.

Miler Lagos studied Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia and Mechanical Engineering at the University of America, Colombia. She has developed numerous projects as an artist in residence at Location One, New York, USA, 2011; at AB Projects, Toronto, Canada, 2010 and 2011; at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2010; at Gasworks in London, UK, and at The Intricate Journey, Berlin, Germany, both in 2009; and Residencia Encuentro Internacional Medellín MED07 at the Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia, 2007. His works and sculptural interventions – which can be considered visual paradoxes – reveal his particular concern for understanding the very essence of the materials that make up his environment while questioning reality as an artificial construction supported by the appearance of things. It makes evident the interest in the observation of nature and the exploration of the phenomena that occur in it, as well as its relationship with cultural production or with political and environmental issues. Projects such as El papel aguanta todo, Silence Dogood, Semillas mágicos or Cimientos, are developed using the technique of carving on stacked paper, which reveals the abundance of printed material, inseparable from the sculptural form that has a clear reference to tree trunks and the properties of paper itself. Her latest projects include The Great Tree of Water, which celebrates the sacred myth of the creation of the Amazon River through sculptures, paper reliefs, collages and large-format drawings, and Breaking Glory, which uses video and photography to capture her experiences in the Canadian Arctic. In her works, she creates situations in which, through scale, she redefines the relationship between the majesty of nature and human presence. RINGS OF TIME It is a series of collages using 400 pages of newspapers. “The idea came from the rings that become visible on the trunk of a tree when it is cut, which not only reveal the age of the tree, but also information about environmental conditions at different moments in time.... The newspaper sheets form concentric circles, evoking time in the same way as when it is recorded on trees,” says Lagos. “They work as archives of information.” Astrid Bastin