Lorna Mills
Lorna Mills is an Internet artist who has been creating work since the 1990’s. Originally from Canada, Mills studied at the Information Technology Design Center at University of Toronto from 1993-1994. Her creations have evolved around the medium of graphic interchange format, more commonly known as the GIF. The content of Mills’ creations come from all across the internet, including websites such as Reddit, 4channel.org, and a variety of forums that post ‘pornfails’ or other inappropriate content for public use. In addition, a part of her creative process often involves using physical materials, which involves scanning, altering, and printing. Despite this aspect of her work, in a 2017 interview with Mira Dayal, Mills states “…everything I do has the smell of digital wafting into the air around it.”. This is very clear in my opinion, because of the form that just about the entirety of her work exists in. In all of her GIFs, Mills used very chunky, pixelated edges to capture individual objects and bring them together on a single background. Often times this background is a plain color, making it very obvious that the figures are all cut out and pasted next to one another.
A complete archive of Lorna Mills work can be found here
There is a significant amount of controversy around Lorna Mills work, to which she has an excellent response for. Mills is clearly a raunchy artist, who captures videos and images that are not always appropriate to all viewing audiences. In one interview she reveals her favorite subjects to work with include “cross-species romance, dogs with itchy butts, drunk people barfing, strange fish, cloud formations, car crashes with test dummies flying out of them, weird glitches from video games that force human bodies into unnatural contortions, hilarious porn scenes, baby pratfalls, animals with clothes on, dogs humping unsuspecting humans, people wanking, kangaroos wanking, bears wanking”—anything outrageous, raunchy or abject”. While these subjects are not typically what people are looking for in a work of art, they represent a large aspect of the internet that Mills is able to effectively capture in her work. When asked questions about this, Mills points to the fact that the Internet is full of this stuff, and anyone has access to it. So, what is the big deal if she is just putting it all together for people to see? Isn’t that why it was posted to the internet in the first place?
Ungentrified (2014) Petting Zoo: Epic Biblical (2020) Petting Zoo: Noble Orphan (2021) SCRAP (2013) PASTE (2015) Carnival of Sorts (2015) Work by Sally McKay Scan to visit Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved (2021) Co-Curated by Lorna Mills and Sally McKay Or click here
Upon digging deeper into Mills work, I discovered that her form is generally constant while her content often varies over the years. Her typical work is reflected in pieces such as Ungentrified (2014), Petting Zoo: Epic Biblical (2020) and Petting Zoo: Noble Orphans (2021). Here Mills uses various GIFS that have all been disassembled and put together into an entirely new piece of artwork. In all three of these there is a black background that causes the GIFs to stand out, pulling in the viewer and allowing them to observe the carefully chosen subjects.
These works are approximately in the middle on the spectrum of raunchiness of Mills work. Earlier on in her career she created two similar pieces titled SCRAP (2013) and SCRAP: Terry (2013), which was later turned into a poster installation in the UK called PASTE (2015). These pieces are very different form, playing with geometric shapes and lines and colors throughout the GIF, with similar amounts of chaos but less pixilation.
The next series of works lands higher on the spectrum, but still far from the max. Carnival of Sorts (2015) was curated with Jennifer Chan and Adrienne Crossman for the G Gallery in Toronto. Using a white background, these capture Mills’ typical style, including the somewhat racy content.
One particular artist who has had an impact on Lorna Mills art is Sally McKay, another Canadian artist who works in performance, installation, and digital media. McKay considers herself an artist, curator, art writer and educator, and she is currently working on a collaborative piece with Mills titled Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved (2021). This piece uses the hand-drawn components of McKay’s previous work combined with Mills’ avid use of GIF’s and background noise to capture the feelings of grief and isolation that have emerged in the past year of living in a pandemic. Prior to this collaboration in 2017, Mills stated “Sally McKay is the artist with the greatest influence on my work” (Dayal, hyperallergic.com) and since they have worked together to create this amazing display.
In one blog post, McKay talks about animated GIFs as a form of Internet art, and the many possibilities that come with them. She says that GIFs are “created, collected, and displayed by everyone” and that “the use of the animated GIF also demonstrates a willingness to plunge into the vernacular of online production, blurring boundaries between art and non-art categories.” When viewing a GIF, it is intended that the user will be sitting at their personal computer screen, in private. And yet with the constantly changing features and accessibility of the Internet this is not always the case.
McKay reminds me of Olia Lialina, who was discussed early in the quarter and has a major presence in the world of Internet art. McKay states in her biography “I like to think about how art can be a point of connection for many people. I am interested in how art intersects with science and social justice.” This point takes me back to Lialina’s interview with Emily Gosling, where she says, “All my work is about being connected—it’s about everything that happens behind the browser rather than what you can see in the window.” In order to remain focused on connection in her work, Lialina choses to display her Internet art only on desktops, making it impossible to view on a mobile device. For artists like Lorna Mills and Sally McKay, who specialize in creating GIFs, they do not have this option. Their creations that are posted to a website in the form of a GIF instantly become easily transferrable files that can be sent to a mobile device, and forever exist in the public commons of the internet.
More Work by Lorna Mills
The Great Code - Sumsing Sweetly (2018)
The Great Code - Home Cookin (2018)
The Great Code - Romantic Beauty PR (2018)
The Great Code - Grrrgarious (2018)
The Great Code - Freedom Fries (2018)
Hand Job - Cointemporary Gallery (2015)
The work in progress of this assignment can be found here
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