Sherry’s artistic vision collapses the familiar distinctions that box our world into opposing categories – high and low; tragic and comic; beautiful and ugly; trash and treasure – revealing them to be mere matters of Perspective.

From billboards to box art, and from dressing style to technology, Sherry enjoys employing formats that have the power to induce a closer look, her projects inspiring the bold promise that “Beauty Is Closer Than You Think.”

When Sherry moved to New York City, she began capturing “street paintings” with her film camera – found, unadulterated scrawls on walls, splattered sidewalk paint, and street lane stains – which evolved into the project A CLOSER NY.

Named to represent Metromedia Technologies’ Outdoor and the Arts Program, A CLOSER NY garnered the support of former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and received special feature by Fourth Arts Block in the form of scaffolding space and through Clear Channel Outdoor’s Local Spirit campaign in the form of billboard space around the city. A short film made about the project, entitled “Sherry Mills on ArtUP”, won entry into the HollyShorts Film Festival.

Additional CLOSER collections were developed in San Diego, LA, Mexico, and Florence.

Sherry’s invention of a new form of Portraiture utilizing the assemblage medium took flight thereafter, which allowed for a more intimate exchange with her audience. From online questionnaires and interviews, Sherry extracted the dreams, struggles, and interests of her subjects and then interpreted them – through the use of photos, dollhouse miniatures, vintage advertising, found objects, and custom-crafted audio-delivered poetry – in box art form.

Her heartbreak over a sudden crash of a 10-year relationship then led to THE BETRAYAL PROJECT. Sherry’s sharing of her real-time pain in a multi-media way led to cathartic response inside her audience. It was her broken heart that originated her role as Relationship Artist and her desire to create provocative art solutions for the emotional release of the pain that leads to sickness, if left alone. Her mission: To Art Your Heart Open.

As Sherry began developing a podcast born of that mission, she ran into a fortuitous challenge.

In order to effectively grow her audience around the long-form audio she was recording, she realized she’d need to segment that audio into smaller, topic-based regions, and make each of those regions as visually intriguing as possible, so that she’d have ample amounts of effective social content with which to generate traffic for her show.

This led Sherry to realize: this issue exists for most podcasters.

What if she could create a solution – not just for her show – but for everyone’s?

Putting her head together with former CEO of MMT and Founder of Big City Radio, Mike Kakoyiannis, a solution was arrived at. As Co-Founders of Tree Goat Media, Inc, they are currently developing a proprietary audio technology platform with an expanding global team.

Sherry has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows internationally, and is represented in Frankfurt, Germany by Alp Galleries. Her work has been featured by SCOPE Basel, Communication Arts, Clear Channel, Casa da Abitare Magazine, The New Inquiry, NYC TV, and she has modeled for Swiss Air, MAC, and Vanity Fair.

Sherry’s Collectors include a handful of National Bestselling Authors, writers for HBO and The New York Times Magazine, stars of MTV, Grammy winners, famous actors, musicians, scientists, architects, and countless lovers of detail and “beauty in the unlikely place” romantics around the globe.

There are two ways to deal with spilled milk. One is to cry over it; the other is to appreciate how fantastic it looks.

Our perspective is all we have… and we are either imprisoned by it, or we are freed by it.

Perhaps you’ve experienced that sweet freedom that comes from putting down the “label” and just letting something – or someone – be exactly what they are.

For me, a great tool for releasing from conflict has been a way of outward seeing that takes in the landscape in a label-less way.

Abstraction becomes the healing agent. It’s all about appreciating form for form’s sake.

When a splattered curb is seen as an exquisite painting of curves, textures, color play… I have succeeded.

For that curb is no longer about dog piss or utility. It is eye candy. It’s a means to melt into my momentary freedom.

I’m always amazed by how the simplest shift of focus, can be so liberating.

How something as simple as tape on a sidewalk could hit me like a museum masterpiece.

The practice of appreciating the mess, the details, the happenstance, exactly as they are… it allows me to find beauty in the areas where I thought it not to be, throughout my everyday life.

Even inside the heartbreaks and the tragedies.

I’ve discovered that once life becomes an everywhere art show, there’s no going back to a time when surrounding riches were scarcely noticed.

No matter the challenges still ahead, it’s how I see… that actually has my back.

I believe appreciation is the necessary ingredient for real global change, because we only take care of the things we appreciate.

When we haven’t an appreciative relationship with our surroundings, it’s easier to cut ourselves off from those larger conversations, like about climate change.

Nothing positive is ever born of conflict. But of gratitude, well…

Gratitude is ready to explode open in every moment, if but for the manner with which we see and take in what’s right in front of us.

And to the extent that we’re courageous enough to play creatively with our pain.

So may your vision be aglow today, with the wonderment of the once mundane. And the brilliance inside those harder landscapes.

Beauty… may be closer than you think!

Yours in the Spills,
Sherry

What was inside that frame, to others, may have been a gorgeous pink line ruined by a smudge of tar. To me, and just like me – it was perfectly imperfect – and therefore asking me not to change a thing. I knew, at least for that moment, that I was going to be ok. Perhaps without realizing it, I was reframing my relationship with “illness” by finding beauty in the unlikely place…

I discovered that wherever beauty is not meant to be, but is discovered to be, illness goes…. away.

Fast forward to the ultimate reframing challenge: the crash of a betrayal-laden ten-year relationship.

What was the secret to my healing?

Becoming a rock star with my pain.

I owned the experience, as an art form. And in doing so, I liberated myself.

We’re not taught to trust pain. We’re taught to run away from it.

Just like we receive lots of education about simple first aid but are severely ill equipped to handle the breakages created by death, divorce, and other emotional losses.

I discovered that the way out of my pain was to lie down inside of it in full surrender, with a pen, a costume change, a playlist, and a box of Kleenex.

The poetess wanted control, and I gave it to her. Because she can find the art inside anything.

Said by Lady Gaga when speaking out about her rape, “You can own your pain and it can be a good part of you.”

I now apply that same “Rock Star” approach to help me through the various challenges, losses, reflections, and transitions of my everyday life.

I’ve found that honest inquiry mixed with creative expression is the ticket to my shine.

So I love sharing my latest Rock Star Moments with my followers, in the hopes of opening your hearts that much wider to the vibrancy that lives… right there inside the harder things.

And whether I’m overcoming loss by covering myself with props or I’m admiring the temporal beauty of life by staring at fake flowers in a shop window…

I am committed to being as honest with you as I can be with me.

And I’m committed to bringing the art that is life to the forefront, for us both to take a good look at it.

So we can be Rock Stars, together.

May you shine that much brighter today, and every day from now on.

Love,
Sherry