Gray Area Grand Theater: Artist Talk & Happy Hour: In Conversation with Lorna Mills

On Sunday, July 12, Gray Area will host an evening of conversation with Lorna Mills, one of the defining figures of net.art and moving-image culture online. Join us for a cocktail mixer, where Mills will be in dialogue with Gray Area Associate Curator Wade Wallerstein discussing the origins of her practice, memetic influence in visual culture, and the general “dumpster fire” nature of the internet these days. Mills’s practice speaks directly to the questions at the heart of Gray Area’s mission: how artists metabolize emerging technology, and how the cultures that form online become material for critical, generative work. Whether you’ve followed her work since the GIF’s first golden age or are encountering it for the first time, this is a rare chance to hear one of the medium’s most singular voices in person. About Lorna Mills: For more than three decades, Mills has built a practice that treats the internet as raw material. Trawling forums, image boards, and the stranger corners of the web for found footage that Mills cuts, loops, and recombines into dense, kaleidoscopic GIF collages. The results are by turns absurd, tender, profane, and hypnotic: a portrait of online culture rendered GIF format. Mills began exhibiting in the early 1990s as a founding member of Toronto’s Red Head Gallery, working across photography, painting, and Super 8 film before turning to digital animation. Since then, her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Museum of the Moving Image, Transmediale, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and reached one of the largest audiences imaginable when her animation Mountain Light/Time took over the screens of Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment series. Her moving-image collages hold the particular and the universal in constant oscillation, often manifesting as oblique critiques of consumption, nationalism, and acceleration disguised as pure, chaotic delight.