Lorna Mills: Caughtinmoment
June 21–Oct 23, 2017
Lorna Mills: Caughtinmoment
Lorna Mills, screenshot of Caughtinmoment at sunrise, 2017
In Caughtinmoment Lorna Mills continues her explorations of the GIF as an iconic visual form of the online environment. The project breaks down images of sunrises and sunsets into pixelated components that wriggle and twist in mechanical, jerky motions. The jagged edges of the looping forms position digital visuals as something between film clips and still images, thereby capturing the essential qualities of their abstraction and beauty. Caughtinmoment remains forever in suspension. It seemingly expands moments of sunrise and sunset into familiar photographic depictions yet immediately contracts them into cutouts that highlight the pixel as a building block of the digital image. The low-resolution, glitchy, and repetitive aesthetics of Mills’s animations invite viewers to contemplate established notions of quality and the value of high-resolution imagery.
Lorna Mills (b. 1958; Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada) has exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s. Her practice spans a variety of mediums ranging from print, painting, and film and video, to online animated GIFs, which she also incorporates into installation work.
Her work has been shown at venues and festivals including Transmediale, Berlin; TRANSFER, New York; DAM Projects, Berlin; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil. In March 2016, her work Mountain Time/Light was displayed in New York’s Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment program curated by Times Square Arts.
Sunrise/Sunset
Sunrise/Sunset was a series of internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds. Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney and the global accessibility of virtual environments.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.