Dalskee

Dalskee

 

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Dallan Milich, who works as Dalskee, is a mixed-media artist from South Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau. His layered, collage-based work draws from vice, mortality, heartbreak, humour, and his growing connection to his Māori whakapapa.

 

He builds his pieces from found imagery, old National Geographics, photographs, and fragments gathered from different stages of his life,including his time in London. The result is work that feels dense, personal, and open-ended. His pieces leave room for contradiction, memory, and the representation of parts of yourself you might not expect to find.

 

His latest collection is a six-piece collaboration with musician Luke-W, made in response to Luke-W’s new album, Yesterday, When Everything Was Temporary. The work is centred around Charlie, a skull-flower character that carries one of the main tensions in Dalskee’s work: beauty, growth and death side by side.

 

Dalskee’s art practice started early. His first work appeared on the cover of his primary school newsletter, and later an art teacher let him skip maths to spend more time working on his boards. That gave him an early sense of what art could be: trial, error, instinct, and a medium without too many rules (Rules are  meant to be broken). 

 

He stepped away from art through his twenties while studying business at AUT and moving overseas, but lockdown in London brought him back to making work at 27. 

 

His work is closely tied to who he is: loyal, funny, tender, and grounded by a shared Kiwi experience. He doesn't shy away from the more complex and painful parts of life. The long corporate hours, grief, heartbreak, friendship, family, escape, and reprieve. Through it all, he keeps a sense of humour and a clear affection for the people and places that shaped him.