Lorna Mills

Canadian alt-film-based and internet artist Lorna Mills has been active in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990's so you could say she is a part of NET ART history already. She has worked in a variety of mediums including Cibachrome printing, painting, super 8 films, and has been producing raw and ethereal digital video animations since 2005, sometimes incorporated into restrained installation work. She has also worked as a game programmer since 1994, starting off in children's CD-ROMs, before moving to web based programs and currently edits video for IPTV and iPad delivery.

Lorna’s latest work revolves around animated GIF’s which she appropriates from the internet in the form of original public unattributed GIF’s grabbed from viral YouTube videos, network news and movies which she then manipulates into her animated collages. The end result is a piece that can be offensive, sexy, violent, and quite often just plain bizarre. These works are made of components from the digital world and are completely designed for viewing on the internet. “They absolutely have to exist on the internet first before I change their context for real life projects”, she explains, “It’s the conditions of the net, economy and compression that make the gifs more interesting to me than just straight up video”. The irony is that in most cases Lorna makes the work off line and it equally lends itself for a unique exhibition experience as well. Her friend and associate on their blog (www.digitalmediatree.com), artist/writer/publisher/curator Sally McKay, compares Lorna’s latest exhibition, “ The Axis of Something”, at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, to the aesthetics of the 1280 Florentine artist Cimabue and his application of gold leaf on canvas; …”Lorna Mills’s artworks have a similar quality in that they impact on several perceptual registers at once. Scanned images of shiny ceramic animals, printed out so large that the highlights become colorful rivers of molten abstraction, gleam with a physical sheen of applied gloss medium. On the monitor, animistic fabrics twist and morph while the digital tools of their making - control handles and anchor points - feather and twitch around them like weird antennae. On another monitor, screens depicting maps of the earth jump around spasmodically, reminding viewers that today's material moments of earthly aesthetic interaction transpire in a conceptual register of global interconnectivity."

Lorna herself describes her GIF work as hovering between film and photography and feels that a looping GIF feels more organic with the jerky looping action somewhat mimicking biological functions like a heartbeat or breathing. She explains that she tends to gravitate toward the ridiculous and has a good sense for it. Extreme and absurd activities appeal to her; so masturbating kangaroos, animals humping inanimate objects, animals who smoke, people fighting, animals fighting, pro wrestling and owls doing absolutely anything are staples in her personal collection of imagery. She says that she spends about two hours a day collecting this odd stuff and when asked what she is trying to say she confesses, “I'm not always sure of that, but for the most part, absurd perpetual conditions, obsessions, perhaps puzzlement over and recognition of 'otherliness'”. A thin but very important thread that has tied all my work in different media together for over 20 years has been my belief that the particular and peculiar can expand to universals which, at an alarming rate, contract right back to the particular and peculiar - basically, constant oscillation punctuated by the odd abrupt rhythm”. Lorna seems to be well balanced between her on line and off line activities with a strong curatorial output and a hybrid practice, blending art production with art criticism, cross-promotion and dialogue. She is a founding member of the The Red Head Gallery which was established in 1990 and is Toronto’s most enduring collectively run art gallery. It has stood the test of time as an exhibition space as well as a collective where critically engaged, highly productive artists enjoy curatorial control over the presentation of their work. Over the past two decades more than 100 artists have been part of The Red Head Gallery and have produced over 200 exhibitions. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the “Sheroes” performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event “When Analog Was Periodical” in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, “:::Zip The Bright:::” that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, with artists Sara Ludy, Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva. As far as promotion there was not a lot of information about this artist but just enough to find out what she is up to and where she will be. There are postings of exhibition info on G+ and Facebook and random GIF’s in the G+ streams and here and there, but if you weren’t looking for her specifically you wouldn’t find them. On her own site, the gifs are just posted as she makes them and I sometimes had to look closely to see whether it was her piece or one of her many GIF friends’ work. One of the influences she mentioned was the work of Francoise Gamma (http://francoisegamma.computersclub.org/), which is absolutely amazing. As I looked at more and more of her work I couldn’t help thinking that her GIF work reminds me of a moving version of the work of the famous photographer Jerry Uelsman; not bad company at all.

Francoise Gamma "Rhetoric on Sublime" Animated GIF References (http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/973600/the-newest-new-media-lorna-mills-on-the-evolving-niche-of-gif) (http://www.triangulationblog.com/2012/04/lorna-mills.html) (http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/) (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/LornaMillsImageDump/)