What strikes on first viewing of a loop by Lorna Mills is the apparent of ugliness of it all: ugliness in terms of subject or content and ugliness in terms of pictorial structure. Beauty, traditionally, prolongs its perception by swinging the eye on a grand tour of sorts; and ugly is that which distracts and confuses and makes the eye smart from its overexertion. The division once was common in handbooks for painters. Today it persists in arts education under loose talk of ‘balance’ and the shopworn ‘rule of thirds.’ Such are the claims to which Mills is the rejoinder: for hers is a kind of dynamics without beauty.

Seth Barry Watter, Lorna Mills, or the Uses of Ugliness, Millennium Film Journal, n. 67, 2018

Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s, both in Canada and internationally. 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. Recent exhibitions include “Abrupt Diplomat” at the Marshal McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, for Transmediale, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn NY, “DKRM” at DAM Gallery, Berlin and Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum in 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.

The next artist showing is Faith Holland, being invited by Lorna Mills.