Miler Lagos

Miler Lagos - The rings of Green America

Artist Biography: Miler Lagos' work is born from his wide and incisive experimentation with different materials and how these have been detonating in central questions that cross and nurture 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 carving it with an angle grinder, the 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.

 

Rings of Time is a series of collages created from 400 copies of the same page of a newspaper. The origin of the piece lies in the rings that become visible on the trunk of a tree once it is cut down. These not only reveal the age of the tree, but also provide information about the environmental conditions that have affected the trunk at different points in time. The arrangement of the newspaper leaves evokes the concentric circles that time engraves on trees, turning them into archives of information and witnesses of memory.