Digital art exhibition: Lorna Mills | Living in Loops
From March 11 to 24, 2024, daily from 7 p.m., various loops of GIF animations can be seen as part of tangente digital art l Living in Loops / Leben in Schleifen.
Ernst-Abbe-Hochhaus, Carl-Zeiss-Strasse 1, 07743 Jena
daily from March 11 at 7:00 / 7:30 / 8:00 / 8:30 / 9:00 / 9:30 / 10:00 p.m. at the high-rise building
Lorna Mills: Living in Loops
Lorna Mills pursues a distinctive artistic approach by transforming everyday fragments from the vastness of the internet into new hierarchies of meaning. GIF animation loops are at the center of her creative process. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a file format of the early Internet that allows short motion sequences and, to save data, only stores the differences between the individual frames of a film. The artist manipulates this type of digital compression and uses it to generate artifacts that she transforms into her own visual language.
In animated loops, the artist manipulates and arranges these individual fragments into pulsating collages that defy conventional categorization. Her work testifies to the malleability of digital content and the unlimited possibilities that arise from its reinterpretation and recontextualization. In doing so, Lorna blurs the boundaries between high, pop, sub and counterculture.
The results are complex yet playful works that are like fluid portraits of a global society struggling with constantly shifting perspectives and timelines. Her groundbreaking work invites viewers to question the digital age and offers a thought-provoking perspective on the intersection of technology, culture, and human identity.
About Lorna Mills
Lorna Mills has been exhibiting her work in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s. She works with Ilfochrome prints, paintings, Super 8 films and videos as well as online animated GIFs, which she integrates into offline installations. Past exhibitions include "Dreamlands" at the Whitney Museum, New York, "Yellowwhirlaway" at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, "The Great Code" at the Transfer Gallery, New York and currently "Sea Change" at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami.
Her GIF collages have recently been featured in "Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art" (PHAIDON), "Digital Art" by Christiane Paul (Thames & Hudson) and "On NFTs" (Taschen).
Lorna Mills lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She is represented by Transfer Gallery, New York and Miami, and DAM Gallery, Berlin.
More about Lorna Mills:
Lorna Mills "Universal Iris"
About the exhibition
As part of the tangente digital art exhibition, two different loops will be projected onto the front and back of the Jenoptik high-rise building each day. A total of 14 works from her extensive oeuvre will be on display: Volare Oh Oh, Universal Iris, Cerebral Concrete, Frank's Stylist is Me, Procession to Calvary, Return of Mom, Tripmaster Flora, You Will Cry Devil, Dis moi tout, April Foolish, Love Sugar, Legendary Wave, Did We Winners Yet?, Troika
The GIFs can be seen daily from March 11 at 7:00 / 7:30 / 8:00 / 8:30 / 9:00 / 9:30 / 10:00 p.m. at the high-rise building.
The curator of tangente digital art I Living in Loops / Leben in Schleifen is Huber & Treff gallery, Jena; co-curator is Robert Seidel, Berlin.
Lorna Mills "Dis moi tout"
Lorna Mills "Volare Oh Oh"
Video art at the Ernst Abbe building
The art projection is Jenoptik's 5th "digital art" exhibition after the Berlin artist Julian Loscher in spring 2022, the Canadian artist Sabrina Ratté in spring 2023, the Berlin video artist Robert Seidel in November 2023 and the interactive installation by the Jena VJ Kurt Komell in December 2023.
With this modern form of the traditional art exhibition series “tangente”, which has been in existence since 1994, Jenoptik combines its long-standing commitment to art with modern digital forms of presentation in line with the motto “More Light”. Since 2021, the permanently installed video mapping system has been in operation, with which large-format images can be projected onto the Ernst Abbe high-rise.
For the realization we thank not only the artist but also our partners who accompany and support the further development of our art engagement: JenaKultur, Huber & Treff gallery for curating our exhibitions and the LEC laser event company for maintaining the video mapping facility.
Read more about the video mapping technology and equipment in our blog article Video mapping for “More Light” in the city of lights, Jena.
