A montage of GIFs created by Sally McKay and Lorna Mills for their Emily H. Tremaine Foundation Commission, "Boost Presume I'm Gonna Breathe Grieved" (2020) (all images courtesy of the artists for Hyperallergic)
Editor’s Note: As collaborators of an influential early ’00s collaborative blog hosted by Digital Media Tree, artists Sally McKay and Lorna Mills share a longstanding interest in collapsing and compressing the voyeuristic and perverted aesthetics and information of an unruly world wide web.
“Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved” (2021) is a GIF art commission for an ongoing Emily H. Tremaine Foundation-supported series. In this scrolling mix of McKay’s scanned, hand-drawn, and illustrated animations of trees and rivers alongside Mills’s knocked-out digital scribbles of smoke and forest fires, a much-needed acknowledgment of pandemic grief and isolation emerges. (Just make sure to hit that “Click Me! Please! Please!” button for the accompanying maudlin, 1970s AM radio soundtrack.)
This commissioned work, curated by the Tremaine’s Journalism Fellow for Curators Rea McNamara, is part of a series looking at how aspects of digital feminisms can inform better online curatorial practices.
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Sally McKay is an artist, curator, art writer, and educator based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University. Sally works in performance, installation, and...
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Lorna Mills
Canadian artist Lorna Mills has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions since the 1990s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film &...
More by Lorna Mills
