Cotton Candy Insulation Keeps You Warm and Cuts Like Glass

Cotton Candy Insulation Keeps You Warm and Cuts Like Glass was a performance and installation work that revolved around inviting a series of participants into the gallery space (during closing hours) to enact choreographed “breakdowns” in front of the camera. The procession of participants (which included: the artist’s mother, a drag performer, an opera singer and a series of amateur performers) were directed to break a series of prop glass objects that ornamented the predominantly pink set. Traditionally made with sugar in the theatre and film industry, these sugar-glass “crystal” tumblers were hurled against a prop wall and stomped into the gallery floor in a series of attempted emotional crescendos that pulled from the gestural language of Hollywood musicals, punk rock and operatic hysteria. Milton returned to the gallery site each morning after a performance, collected the shards of candy glass, spun them into cotton candy and in turn, used this temporarily fluffy pink material to insulate the wall of the set. The residue of this transformation of materials accumulated within the gallery, culminating in a screening of the performances during the last week of the exhibition. Throughout this work, Milton aimed to investigate notions of the performativity of objects, the spectacularization of emotion and the connection between material and psychic rupture.