Kristen Mills

Instagram: @k.millzzzzzzzzzzz

Website: https://millskristen.com/

Bio: Kristen Mills is an interdisciplinary visual artist hailing from the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn, NY. Her work engages a variety of strategies: video, installation, comedic performances, and teaching in an ongoing investigation into what makes something believable. As a part of her studio research, she has been an artist in residence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-2025). Mills gained her first museum show at the Delaware Contemporary, in 2017, with her collaborative project, Sister Spaceship. She has also held solo exhibitions at PRACTICE Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY; and currently at Turley Gallery in Hudson, NY (Sept 14-Oct 27, 2024).

Statement: I use video and images to engage with timing and humor. I use myself as a surrogate for others, freeing me to poke fun at pop-cultural assumptions and behaviors. I multiply and position myself as willful yet unexceptional in these various versions of “me”. I work things out this way, where I create interactions with myself, and I can rearrange my world how I want. I create situations where I belong or where I work to prove that I belong - using personalities, acts, and labor to distinguish these self-characters. Staging and sound are critical as they act as props or characters that assist in the telling. I often create cardboard structures for my sets; pairing digital work with analog material has allowed me to look at things differently. I blend the real with the staged to heighten visual and cerebral absurdities. I am fascinated by the difference between what is real and what is fake, or what makes something believable. While I never set out specifically to create work that is often viewed as "campy", my humor and playful approach align with the camp sensibility that embraces deliberate exaggeration and the intentional blurring of boundaries between high and low culture.