McLuhan Salon, Embassy of Canada, Ebertstraße 14, 10117 Berlin
Opening: 27 January 2015, 20:00-22:00
Exibition: 27 January until 1 February 2015, Opening times: Mon-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-18:00

The work of Lorna Mills forms patterns that defy progress and instead suspend the viewer in an endless retreat from the familiar. In the solo exhibition, Abrupt Diplomat, on display at the Marshall McLuhan Salon, we are treated to a largely new edition of Lorna Mills ongoing GIF animations. In her short and numerous GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) works the characters are constantly misbehaving, and the rhythms and patterns she establishes digitally are unmistakably natural, random and so far removed from their regular discourse that the agency rests in the framing of the piece via time and proximity. By imposing strict control, Mills creates images that are out of control, outside of time and modality. What if the action of resisting all capture lay in the capture of just a few seconds: a few moments that with each repetition wind up around something else, something intangible and outrageous, an idiosyncratic infinite moment of joy and confusion, each repeated instance a step away from normality, from archive, no work and all play, the moment captured building upon itself in meaning. “A dancing bear equals a crusty hippy equals a wagging tail equals a face plant equals kittens, acres of kittens equals a belching frog equals a jiggling fat man equals a car crash equals a street fight. In one of the GIFs, a dolphin puppet stares at the wrestlers writhing beneath it. The dolphins eyes are popping out, its mouth is wide open, in a grin or a gasp. The dolphin is the viewer and the dolphin is Mills. Mills’s art is always, at heart, an act of sharing.” says RM Vaughan about Mills work in his essay FLICKERING FORMALISM: THE ART OF LORNA MILLS. And as in his description, this act of balance amounts itself to noise, visual, silent tremble a wall of resistance to data formation.

In addition to the exhibition, on 31 January there will be the screening of the first and second parts of Ways of Something, a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing (1972). The project is a commission by The One Minutes, at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills. The two parts feature 58 web-based artists each contributing one-minute videos, combining 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the Internet.

The exhibition and screening is realised in cooperation with the Marshall McLuhan Salon at the Embassy of Canada, which holds one of the most significant collections of audio-visual material by and about the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, as well as a large number of his publications.