Miler Lagos

Miler Lagos - The Rings of Strategy

Technique: Collage made with newspaper

Artist Biography: Miler Lagos' work is born from his wide and incisive experimentation with different materials and how they have been detonating in central questions that cross and nourish his work. One of his main searches has been the relationship between images and objects, somehow between content and container. This is how from paper he arrives 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 between working with paper as a container, thanks to an accident while he was carving it with an angle grinder, paper returned to its natural condition, that of being a tree. This fortuitous encounter allows us to see his diverse interests, which mostly lie at the intersection of nature and culture, in how human beings have modeled their space or have been modeled by environmental/geographical conditions, by rivers, lagoons, trees, mountains, and how we gradually turn nature into a resource to inhabit it, into raw material, into just a vehicle. It is just at that point where his exploration with materials transforms these concerns and matter is able to reveal its essence. He has participated in the Biennial of Cuenca, Ecuador; Open Art Orebro, Sweden; SITE Biennial Santa Fe New Mexico, USA; Havana, Cuba; TRIENNIAL POLI/GRÁFICA San Juan, Puerto Rico; Biennial of the Americas, Denver, USA; VIII Biennial of Bogota, 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; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de 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 can be found in collections such as MUAC Museo de Arte Universidad Autónoma de Mexico; Harvard University; Banco de la República de Colombia; Rubell Family Collection and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO.

 

Miler Lagos studied Plastic Arts at the National University of Colombia and Mechanical Engineering at the University of America, Colombia. America, Colombia. He 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 Residency Encuentro Internacional Medellín MED07 at the Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia, 2007. His sculptural works and interventions - which can be considered visual paradoxes - reveal his particular interest in understanding the very essence of the materials that constitute his environment while questioning reality as an artificial construction supported by the appearance of things. His 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, is evident. Projects such as El papel aguanta todo, Silence Dogood, Semillas mágicas or Cimientos, are developed through 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 the trunks of trees and the properties of the paper itself. Among his latest projects are The Great Tree of Water, which celebrates the sacred myth of the creation of the Amazon River through sculptures, paper reliefs, collage and large format drawings, or Breaking Glory, in which through video and photography, he collects his experiences in the Canadian Arctic. In his works, he creates situations in which, through scale, he resizes 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 down, which not only reveal the age of the tree, but also information about environmental conditions at different moments in time..... The newspaper leaves form concentric circles, which evoke time in the same way as when it is recorded on trees," says Lagos. "They work as archives of information." Astrid Bastin