KRISTEN MILLS: BELIEVABILITY

September 12 - October 11, 2020
Opening Reception: Saturday September 12, 1-8pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present the opening of Believability, a solo exhibition of new work by Open Call 2020 Main Space recipient, Kristen Mills. Opening Reception will be held on Saturday, September 12, 2020 from 1-8pm. Please note that in order to follow social distancing measures, OyG will allow visitors into the gallery in shifts. **All visitors must wear protective face coverings at all times while inside the gallery** 

Believability, an exhibition of new works by Kristen Mills, takes her video work into a physical dimension. Literally. Ortega y Gasset Project’s Main Space has become a stage setting for videos featuring hand-made scenes, props, and backdrops composed much like the intimate studio sets of her video works.  The exhibition continues Mills’ ongoing video manifesto - a durational piece made up of a number of video shorts. Though farcical and non-linear at times, the content of this work is directly dictated by her circumstances as her own daily realness blatantly shines through. This is where believability exists. 

Artist StatementI make videos about seemingly innocuous scenarios. I use video to engage with timing and humor, and I use myself as a surrogate for others, freeing me to poke fun at pop-cultural assumptions and behaviors. In these various versions of “me”, I position myself as willful yet unexceptional, in order to highlight the content and side step autobiographical confessions. My work can be read as silly or heavy-handed, how ever subverting larger looming issues such as gender, identity, and classism. I consciously blend and blur the real with the staged in order to heighten visual and cerebral absurdities.

Bio
Kristen Mills holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and an MSAE from MassachusettsCollege of Art and Design. She is a former adjunct Assistant Professor, teaching at both Tyler and Mass Art while co-running/owning Cloud Coffee, an artist-run mobile caffeinated endeavor. In 2016, Mills maintained an Artist-in-Residence position at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in 2017, she gained her first museum show with her collaborative project, Sister Spaceship, at the Delaware Contemporary Museum. In 2018, Mills successfully thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail (northbound) and then began a year-long residency/staff-artist position at the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently living in Vermont employed as VSC’s Visual Arts Program Manager. Mills’ work engages a variety of strategies: video art, installations, talk shows, comedic performances, collaborative engagements, and teaching - in an ongoing investigation of how meaning is constructed in our contemporary culture. Her work has been exhibited in many, many excellent places.