SHORING

BRADLEY MILLIGAN AND NICHOLAS WISNIEWSKI

MAY 14-JUNE 27, 2026

On view at Red Giant, Shoring presents new work by artists Bradley Milligan and Nicholas Wisniewski. The title invokes the act of propping up a weakening structure and the constantly shifting zone where land meets water. Both bodies of work treat surfaces as archives where structure, history, and repair are built over time and made visible in the material itself.

Nicholas Wisniewski works with the built environment as both subject and medium. Wisniewski carves images of hyper-local architecture into chunks of drywall excavated from abandoned buildings around Baltimore. For this exhibition, he enacts a structural intervention by removing parts of the gallery wall, exposing a view of the buildings across the street that he depicts in his detailed drywall sculptures. Wisniewski has spent years working at the intersection of art and urban development in Baltimore, a history present in his layered approach to material. He plays with the mutability of the built environment by disrupting the barrier between the gallery and the city. Drywall transforms from a neutral support to a prized material salvaged from the very buildings he is depicting, sites of neglect and loss that he renders in ways that feel both documentary and elegiac.

Bradley Milligan debuts a lifesize recreation of his minivan out of scrap wood and joint compound using labor intensive techniques honed through his trade as a carpenter. His wall works are built from layers of plaster, gesso, and wood; materials chosen for their history. Plaster is a repair substance and a disguise, something that covers damage while holding its shape while wood implies building, structure, and labor. Milligan treats his sculptural reliefs as relics from a tradition that has drifted so far from its origins it approaches legend. His works fragment and bastardize their subjects, and yet still carry the memory of the hands that made them. Milligan draws on the visual culture of rural America and the roadside vernacular: The handpainted signs, camouflage patterns, molding, and repair work accumulate into something between craft and mythology. Painting, for Milligan, is an act of preservation and endurance used selectively throughout the show. The work is ultimately about resilience: class optimism that survives decay, strength redefined as care and maintenance, repair understood not just as an aesthetic gesture but as an ethical one.

Together, the works in Shoring are about what persists through or is built from loss. Both artists locate a hard-won and practical hope in the act of repair. Wisniewski approaches the abandoned and the neglected with reverence, insisting that attention paid to a failing structure is itself a form of resistance. Milligan finds dignity and optimism in the skills and traditions of working people, treating craft not as nostalgia but as a living form of knowledge that a throwaway culture undervalues at its own expense. Taken together, their works propose that the impulse to fix, to preserve, to hold something together even imperfectly, is not a consolation for a broken world but evidence that people keep imagining a better one.

Artist Bios

Bradley Milligan (b. 1996, Easton, MD) is a painter and builder from Maryland's Eastern shore. He received a BFA from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and an MFA from Boston University in 2021. He is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields foundation grant. Bradley's work is in the permanent collection of the Evansville Museum in Indiana, and of Penn West University. In 2023 he and two other artists founded the short-lived project space, Outlet. He is a director and founder of 95 Gallon gallery and a curator at Below Grand.

Nicholas Wisniewski (b. 1982, Essex, MD) is an artist and builder working in Baltimore City. After receiving his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004, he co-founded the Baltimore Development Cooperative, whose project Participation Park, a squatted community garden in Johnston Square, was awarded the Sondheim Prize in 2009. In 2010 he co-founded the Compound, an artist-run residence, studio, and event space in East Baltimore Midway. His work has been presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Creative Time Summit (2009), the Venice Biennale (2012), and Documenta 13, and has been written about in the Baltimore Sun, BmoreArt, Art in America, Artforum, and Whitewall. In 2024, he had a solo exhibition, Just Below the Surface, curated by Derrick Adams, at Swann House Gallery, Hotel Ulysses, Baltimore.