Lorna Mills facts for kids

Lorna Mills is a Canadian artist known for her digital animations, videos, and GIFs. She also creates art installations. Her work often uses GIFs that she finds from different online sources. Lorna Mills currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Early Life and Learning

Lorna Mills was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. From 1993 to 1994, she studied Digital Media at the University of Toronto. Before she started making digital art, she worked with older types of media. These included Super 8 film, video, painting, and photography.

Mills taught herself how to program and edit videos. As a child, she would quickly flip through novels. This way of looking at things has stayed with her. It shows in her art, which often looks like choppy or incomplete GIF collages.

Her Art Career

In 1990, Lorna Mills helped start the Red Head Gallery in Toronto. This is a gallery run by artists. Around this time, she began showing her art in solo and group exhibitions. Her early work often combined four types of media. These were Cibachrome printing, painting, super 8 film, and later, digital video animations. She often used these in her installation art.

In 1994, Mills started working as a game programmer for children's CD-ROMs. Later, she programmed for web programs. At the same time, she began making digital animations. She mentioned that many of her early animations were interactive. However, she became more interested in video looping around 2005.

Early in her career, Mills met artist Sally McKay. McKay invited Mills to post on her blog, Digital Media Tree. This collaboration helped Mills realize she could create her own graphics.

Famous Exhibitions and Projects

In 2013, Lorna Mills' GIFs were shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This was part of the "David Bowie Is..." exhibition. This show helped her become known as an experienced media artist in Toronto.

She also helped organize a GIF exhibition in Berlin. It was called When Analog Was Periodical. Mills became very interested in making lenticular prints from GIFs. These prints look like they move when you view them from different angles. She worked with a company called GifPop to create these successful images.

In 2014, Mills was chosen to curate a "pavilion" for the Wrong Biennial. This is an online art show. She also curated a video series called Ways of Something. This series was based on an old documentary by art historian John Berger. For this video, Mills invited many web-based artists. Each artist created one minute of footage about their art.

She also took part in The House in the Sky exhibition. This show was held at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Mills describes her art process as "obsessive." She says that internet art, which uses images found online, can take a long time to create.

In March 2016, Mills presented her work Mountain Light/Time in Times Square, NYC. This was part of the Midnight Moment Project.

Lorna Mills is represented by TRANSFER in Brooklyn, New York. She is also represented by DAM Gallery in Berlin.

In 2024, Lorna Mills' art was part of the Sea Change exhibition. This show was at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in Florida. It explored how art can respond to environmental issues.

Her Art Style

Lorna Mills' art often shows strong images. These images relate to everyday life, stress, and modern human behaviors. Her art style pushes the limits of what is considered "normal" art. It challenges ideas from traditional art schools and professional internet art.

Mills' work shows great energy. This comes from the fast pace of the images. It also comes from the unusual way they move. One art critic described her work as a "nauseating version of the internet." They said it was like a "frantic Tumblr feed." There is always movement on the screen, and one piece often blends into another. This creates a feeling of immediate chaos. It can be disturbing, interesting, and sometimes funny.

Ways of Something Video Series

Ways of Something is a collection of one-minute videos. Lorna Mills put them together and curated them. They were released in March 2015. The One Minutes, at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, asked her to create this project. It was a modern remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, "Ways of Seeing" (1972).

The first episode had one-minute videos from 113 web-based artists. These artists often work with 3D art, GIFs, and online performances. They used these to show what it's like to make art after the internet. Ways of Something was made in four episodes. Each one-minute video had closed captions. Mills did this to "magnify the discontinuity visually, yet also unite it." The whole series was later shown at the Whitney Museum's exhibition, "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016."

At Play in The Fields of the Lord

This art project explores topics about modern life. These include different groups of people, daily routines, stress, and human behaviors. It was shown at the Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn. This was her second solo show there. The exhibition included a series of "looped visual animates." These were moving images that played over and over. It included both old and new pieces.

The title of the show came from a book by Peter Matthiessen. Mills chose it to match the "purposeful non-sense" in her art. This show was one that Mills had always wanted to do at Transfer Gallery. She was finally able to do it because she had the right equipment.

Abrupt Diplomat at Transmediale 2015

Mills was invited to have a solo show of her new GIF works. This was at the Marshall McLuhan Salon in the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. It was part of Transmediale 2015. The festival director, Kristoffer Gansing, wrote that Lorna Mills' work "forms patterns that defy progress." He said it makes the viewer feel like they are in an "endless retreat from the familiar."

Echo, Rise, Repeat

Echo, Rise, Repeat was an art piece shown at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. This piece featured an endless loop of animations. They were installed inside the gallery's elevator. Visitors would take a slow ride to one of the building's four floors. As they rode, they would see her GIFs quickly repeating over and over.

How She Creates Her Art

When Lorna Mills creates a new artwork, she starts by searching certain websites for images. She looks for "GIFs that are un-arty." These are often made from real footage and are not part of mainstream culture. Mills especially likes subjects that are unusual or strange.

She then removes the chosen subjects from their original backgrounds, frame by frame. The cuts are often rough. They might leave small edges of the original background attached. This gives the images a "grainy, pulsating aura." She then combines these images using Adobe Flash Professional. When she puts the images together, Mills tries to make a piece where the GIFs move on their own but still relate to each other.