SPRING/BREAK LA
LORNA MILLS
February 14 – 16th, 2020
at SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA
ABOUT THE GALLERY
TRANSFER is an experimental gallery that explores simulation and expanded practice. The gallery was founded in Brooklyn in 2013 to support artists making computer-based artworks, by installing solo exhibitions of experimental media art. In 2016 the gallery shifted to focus programming on solo exhibitions from women refiguring technology, and began traveling a new virtual exhibition format called the ‘TRANSFER Download’. In TRANSFER’s seven years, the gallery has produced over 75 exhibitions of experimental media art, including international exhibitions, pop-ups and art fairs. In 2019 the gallery relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Los Angeles, California.
TRANSFER is pleased to present ‘Petting Zoo: Epic Biblical’ a new Animated GIF Installation from Lorna Mills. Expanding her ‘Petting Zoo’ series, Mills captures ‘petting’ in all its manifestations: sometimes light, sometimes heavy, sometimes soothing, sometimes frenzied.
With the diligence of the obsessive, Lorna Mills has been appropriating and reimagining internet imagery since the 1990s. She samples everything from pop culture to pornography on her digital canvas, and she brings this digital sensibility to bear as well in the work she makes with physical scanning and printing processes. Mills has been at the forefront of presenting animated GIFs in exhibitions, bringing her medium to highly visible spaces like Time Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program and the Museum of the Moving Image’s GIF Elevator. She is a pioneer in net art: not only has she made her own pieces for the last 20 years, but she has also organized such iconic works as the four-part Ways of Something, which features literally dozens of artists, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and added to the museum’s permanent collection.
“I always consider myself working when I’m online,” Mills says. For her, no distinction exists between mindless browsing and more intentional searching. She sources from Reddit, Google+, Porn Fail, and dubious Russian sites; her work is wonderfully profane and she takes clear delight in so-called “gratuitous internet filth.” On the other hand, she makes us pay attention to apparently mundane imagery we might not think about twice.
Petting Zoo: Epic Biblical is no different with its enormous cast of animals—bunnies, crabs, snakes, elephants, squirrels— and fire layered with abstract vulgarities.
ARTIST BIO
Canadian artist Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s, both in Canada and internationally. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film and video, and obsessive online animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. Recent exhibitions include “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, NY, “Yellowwhirlaway” 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 Los Angeles, Ellephant in Montreal and DAM Gallery in Berlin.
WORK DETAILS
Petting Zoo: Epic Biblical (2020)
Single-channel Animated GIF Installation
Resolution: HD 1920 x 1080p, Duration: Variable, Looping
Edition 1 + 1AP
The work is delivered on SSD drive, along with a signed certificate of authenticity. The package includes full resolution animated GIF collage masters in HD 1920 x 1080p, in addition to looping videos rendered in .MP4 format for easy playback.
PRESS CONTACT ## Kelani Nichole: director@transfergallery.com