Moving Image New York

Work by Lorna Mills

March 6

through March 9, 2014

TRANSFER presents a new GIF installation work from Lorna Mills and a debut video piece from Rollin Leonard during Moving Image NYC 2014.

SCRAP: Rayon is the latest set of animations in Lorna Mills’s ongoing SCRAP series. Based on scans of printed textiles, the images are distorted with Bezier curves, bending them with motions that mimic bodily rhythms. Intentionally pixelated and defined by a chunky digital aesthetic, these animations track their making with the visible nodes and anchors of the digital imaging tools plainly in sight.

Mills makes animated gifs with an emphasis on cacophony and rhythmic movement pushed to a variety of extremes. Ravingly formal but dissonant, her collage work sometimes skirts the boundaries of what the eye can passively handle before it actively seeks out patterns and resolution.

Lorna Mills (Canadian) has actively exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. 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.

Wave is a new work from Rollin Leonard (inspired by the artist’s attempts to teach himself to float in water) depicting the body under the constraints of a strictly limited system. The system itself has been obscured, leaving the body — whose dimensions we innately understand — to act as a way of depicting that system. The system is described by its effects, rather than by its rules. The body acts as an instrument for depiction, instead of as the object of depiction.

As in much of his work, the artist uses bodies as a way of ascribing agency to less-human objects and ideas. “The ocean is the furthest from easy personification,” says Leonard. “I never understand why people talk about the ocean as a ‘her’ with a specific temper. The analogies are really thin. It is just an elemental force — completely unfeeling.”

Rollin Leonard (American, 1984) lives and works in Portland, Maine where he maintains a photography and production studio. He has shown large­ scale video installations, photographic prints, and web­ based work since 2004. His medium varies but his conceptual approach is consistent – projecting the logic, meaning, or pattern from one domain into another, often using the human body as a vehicle to do so. Leonard earned a BA in Philosophy and a BA in Painting from the University of Minnesota in 2007.



Animated GIF preview of Wave by Rollin Leonard.