For Clyde and Anna Lee
2017
"Hillary Wagner’s work ["For Clyde and Anna Lee"] explores the complexities of memory through images and materials recovered from her grandparents’ now-abandoned dairy farm in southwestern Ohio. In the exhibition, Wagner has produced an installation that effectively recreates an image from her childhood in the physical form of a steel tank used for keeping milk fresh before pasteurization. The steel tank, with its swirling milk, is paired with found drawings and documents from her grandparents and Wagner’s poetic responses to them. Together these elements recall not only a specific place and moment in time, but also the attempt to recover a bond between the artist and her family."
- Chelsea Haines, Curator of "Second Nature" Parsons School of Design 2017 Thesis Exhibition
bulk milk cooling tank / cool steel containment
earth /
agitator spinning / motor hum / sweetness
swirling time /
somewhere underneath
the first taste /
bound to time /
its effects
a machine for / a memory of a machine sighing / a sigh
not sadness / a futile task
where did the body that I came from / care from
/ come from / inherit / inherent
cooing / soft across the field
murmur / to meet underground
heat radiating / slow round body
tubes turn white
