‘POST-CARD, POST-BOOK’, by Jack Milroy - at Benjamin Rhodes

This inaugural Shoreditch presentation of Jack Milroy’s work examines the artist’s sustained engagement with printed ephemera and structural invention, foregrounding pieces produced following his relocation to England’s south coast. Milroy’s practice, extensively documented in the 2016 monograph CUT OUT, operates through a process of archival retrieval and material reconfiguration, transforming culturally sourced fragments into complex meditations on memory, form, and narrative.

Central to the exhibition are Milroy’s recent “book-pieces,” which exemplify his method of constrained innovation. In works such as the reconfigured Plantes Grimpantes, the artist introduces modular peg systems as non-illustrative structural supports, a solution that emerged from years of technical deliberation. 

This approach underscores a core tenet of Milroy’s philosophy: that creative freedom is contingent upon self-imposed formal rules, a dialectic between constraint and possibility that distinguishes sustained artistic inquiry from what he terms the “rule-less” production endemic to digital platforms.

Similarly, his postcard constructions demonstrate how material discoveries precipitate aesthetic breakthroughs. The adaptation of a self-standing photo frame mechanism enabled the postcard image to function dually as both representation and structural support, facilitating compositions that operate as visual syntaxes, spatial arrangements akin to literary sentences. Works like Six Short Stories in Search of an Author explore the narrative potential of sequence and juxtaposition, positioning the artist as both author and architect of meaning.

Not only repurposing material or simply re-representing detritus, Milroy instigates critical dialogues with these elements, investing the ephemeral with allegorical weight and ontological presence.

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