Sarah Gregg Millman’s videos use conventions borrowed from film and television to explore the inner and outer lives of women. Two of the four works in this exhibition, titled “The Milk of Human Kindness,” are interior monologues presented as voice-overs: In one, a woman muses on her desire to be pregnant while stroking her swollen belly, which is almost certainly due to a pillow stuffed under her dress—you can see what might be striped ticking through the cloth. (In the end, she decides, it’s more about the longing for the magic of pregnancy than it is for a child; “perhaps women would give birth to puppies if they had the choice,” she muses.) In another, which recalls nothing so much as the kind of self-conscious and slightly scripted exegeses that take place in the so-called confession booths of reality television, a woman, looking slyly at the camera only for brief moments, reveals that if she had a husband and children, she’d probably abandon them—she’d up and disappear into the woods.
This kind of forthcoming oddity disappears in a video depicting a job interview conducted against a featureless backdrop of office buildings. Snow swirls against the anonymous city as the interviewer asks to inspect the applicant’s fingernails and asks a number of questions that cannot be answered with anything resembling the truth. With her perky but calculatedly inoffensive demeanor, the applicant, who lists her best qualities as “punctual,” “likes people,” and “team player,” becomes more hopeful leading lady than mere voice-over, and we are invited to admire the distance she has traveled from one to the other—and to speculate on how much has been lost in that short leap.
