We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sydney Mills. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sydney below.

Sydney, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Since choosing to get my undergraduate degree in art back when I was only 17 years old, it feels like most decisions I’ve had to make throughout my career have been risky.

After graduating from undergrad with student loans and a hand-me-down car that was on its last leg, I needed a good paying job fast. I ended up working as a freelance production assistant in the film industry. I thought this job would enable me to self-fund projects while giving me flexibility in my schedule to take time off to make new work. Unfortunately, my paychecks weren’t enough to cover my student loans, car payment, and rent, let alone pay for new art projects.

I was quickly offered the chance to move up to a position that not only paid more than double what I was making as a PA but also gave me the opportunity join a union that offered benefits and healthcare. I was still very young and I knew the position wasn’t right for me but took the job anyway, hoping I’d finally be able to afford to make my artwork again.

Turns out the position wasn’t just “not right for me.” I hated my new job with every fiber of my being. It sucked the life out of me and even though I now had to money to be able to pay for projects, I was too overworked and depressed to start anything new.

After six miserable years of working in production, with most of my twenties behind me, wasted on a job I loathed, I had had enough and decided to take a sabbatical from the film industry to attend California Institute of the Arts in pursuit of a graduate degree in Photography & Media. While CalArts is a great school, it’s also insanely expensive. I needed to take out more loans in order to attend but ultimately decided that a two year stint back in school to reset on my ailing brain and reinvigorate my art practice was worth any cost to me.

Graduate school gave me most of the things I expected it to. My artwork progressed leaps and bounds. I established relationships with peers and mentors that I hope last a lifetime. And most importantly, my mind was clear and free for the first time in years.

Making a living in the arts is a challenge for most people, if not impossible. After watching many of my friends and peers struggle to survive by teaching or working in galleries and artist studios, I decided to suck it up and go back to production, this time stronger, older, and with better life/work boundaries.

It’s now been 17 years since I began attending my first art school. I think this year was the first time I could really see how all the risks I’ve taken to ensure I could self-fund any project I come up with, no matter the scope, while still allowing myself the space to let my work breath and evolve have paid off. This year alone, I’ve had a solo show at a gallery, produced and directed my most ambitious directing project to date and had three of my video works shown in two film festivals.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an artist and a filmmaker. My work is a dark and introspective journey into the depths of the human experience, a critique of the forces that seek to dehumanize us, and an exploration of the anxieties that haunt our collective consciousness. With overtly visceral imagery, my work dissects the boundaries between the self and the other, the organic and the synthetic, exposing an unsettling amalgamation of human flesh, stripped bare of the comforting veneers that often shroud our daily lives.  I aim to confront my audience with the uncomfortable and the nightmarish, forcing a confrontation with the abject that serves as catharsis, allowing us to confront our anxieties surrounding our bodies and the commodification of our very being.

When creating a new piece of art, I usually allow my ideas to dictate the medium I work in but for the most part I make photographs, experimental videos and sculptures.

I also make a lot of music videos, all of which I have partially or wholly funded myself. I have been borderline obsessed with the art of music videos since I was 14 years old, obsessively watching Pop Up Video, TRL and Making The Video when I wasn’t jacking up my parents’ cable and phone bills by endlessly requesting pay-to-play videos on The Box. Music videos have served as a constant source of inspiration and creativity throughout my life.

I also make all the props, sets and special effects featured in both my art and directing projects. While my relationship with my day job is still tenuous at best, I appreciate that my 13 years of experience working in the film industry within the art, set decoration and prop departments has given me the skills and knowledge needed to create the kind of work I make today.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Since my first art class taken as a teenager, my unwavering goal as an artist has been to make the vibrant worlds, visions, dreams, and fantasies that have occupied my headspace daily since childhood a reality. Photography and filmmaking were my first artistic outlets, chosen for their ability to capture and convey the intricate details of the vivid images I imagined in a literal and representational way. Yet sometime while I was in graduate school, I realized that even photography and film sometimes fell short in truly encapsulating the full spectrum of my ideas. This realization led me to explore the realm of sculpture, where I discovered a newfound power to tangibly manifest some of the unsettling discomfort I aim to get across in much of my work.

One of my graduate school faculty once said to me, “I bet if someone threw up while looking at your artwork, it would make you really happy.” He was very correct. If my work elicits a physical response of out of the people who see it, I know I’m doing something right. I aim to repulse and turn on my audience simultaneously.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the frequent yet invaluable opportunities to meet and collaborate with fellow artists and craftspeople from other creative fields on each project I work on. I am not and have never been the type of artist who can work for days on end in their studio, isolated from others and making my work alone without any assistance or feedback.

Filmmaking in particular is a medium that requires collaboration in order for almost any finished work to get made. Each crew member brings their unique perspective, skills, and experiences to the table. For me, working alongside others not only enriches the creative process but also fosters a sense of community and shared passion. For example, while making my last music video project, “Suck City” for the band Persekutor, nearly everyone who worked on the video behind the scenes is a film industry professional. As this video was low/no budget and mostly self-funded, I literally could not have made “Suck City” without the help of my friends and colleagues, all of whom donated their time and labor to help create my vision.

Everyone who appears in or worked on this video did so for free. All production equipment, expendables, cameras and lighting were borrowed from friends and friends of friends. We shot the video in the parking lot of my uncles printmaking studio. All picture vehicles were generously brought in by our talent and members of the band. Much of our set dressing was given to us for free by friends.

As this was my biggest and most intense production to date, I was for the first time in years paralyzed with fear that I might fail hard. But when I saw how many people showed up to help make this project the best it could be, I was suddenly filled with hope that the video could actually be a success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sydneymills.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/generalviolence/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiLyfp76lu1jyPfVnZNfq1g

Image Credits
All images are courtesy of Sydney Mills except the image of Mills on the set of “Suck City” which is courtesy of Senna Chen