Death and the young - Lorna Mills

Lorna Mills, Canadian artist active since early 1990’s, developed her own visual language through obsessive use of animated GIFs. If GIFs are one of the most representative symbols of the vernacular nature of the Web, one that characterized its history from the very beginning to the present, vernacular are also the contents and the characters the artist chooses to work with. With her works Mills depicts the libertarian, amusing, weird, disrespectful and sometimes disgusting spirit of the Web, looking for images in the most hidden and deep places of the internet. In her works abject and shallow characters are animated in endlessly repeated gestures. Each single looped movement is related and somehow connected to all the others, sometimes creating choral compositions, sometimes simple but not less powerful duets. The deliberate act of appropriation of these images is clearly declared by the artist: the figures are roughly cut out from their original background, with a pixelated effect that on one hand recall their vernacular origin, as well as their low resolution, while on the other hand explicitly reminds of the isolating process they undertook, but leaving evidence that they are from elsewhere.
Death and the young Link is the work Mills created for the exhibition at Link Cabinet and represents her homage to Link Art Center.

Canadian artist, Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s, both in Canada and Internationally. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. Recent exhibitions include “Abrupt Diplomat” at the Marshal McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, for Transmediale, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn NY, “DKRM” at DAM Gallery, Berlin, “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, NY, “Wetland” at the Museum of the Moving Image, NY and “The Great Code” at Transfer Gallery, NY.  For the month of March, 2016, her work “Mountain Time/Light was displayed on 45 Jumbo monitors in Times Square, NYC, every night as part of the Midnight Moment program curated by Times Square Arts.
Lorna Mills is represented by Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and DAM Gallery in Berlin.