Milano Chow’s practice engages the visual language of perceived architectures and framed narratives through graphite renderings and collage. Employing ornamental and illusionistic elements, she recasts the confines of interior environments and exterior structures, accentuating the boundaries between intimacy and exclusion. Pulled in part from film sets and architectural renderings, Chow’s drawings of domestic interiors and pierced façades hover indeterminately between reality and its construct. Building tension between private and public, these spaces are as much spectacle as screen, assured in their illustration and yet resolutely thin.

«The works on paper evoke the voyeuristic act of looking into a private domain. Based on architectural elevations and antiques, the drawings depict ornate facades and clocks with figures collaged into them. Windows and doors emulate screens and create pictures within pictures. I prefer using fashion models for the figures because of their awareness of the camera and because their staged quality complements the drawings’ artifice.»

Milano Chow, October 2020

Within the context of these constructions, Chow draws out the systems of our own observation. Neither window nor wall, these works are paper architectures in form as much as feasibility. They are the impossible structures of the imagination, the exhibitionism of space and the modern subject laid bare: built up, broken down and revealed, but never resolved.