2014
Entheogen Venn, Clairvoyant Vision, Vespertine (Datura, A Bed Slept in Once)
Klontal Triennale 2014, Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland




Clairvoyant Vision, 2014
Entheogen Venn, 2014
Teleplastic Alloy (Mystic Triangle), 2014
Vespertine (Datura, A Bed Slept in Once)
Klontal Triennale 2014, Kunstahus Glarus
Glarus, Switzerland
For Other Explications, Mitchell presents a series of new sculptural and photographic works that chart the territory between sleeping and waking, conscious and subconscious. Hypnosis, as an alternate state of consciousness, provides a framework through which Mitchell considers and teases the nature of perception and belief.
The main gallery contains two highly polished, large brass hoops conjoined to form a three-dimensional Venn diagram (Hypnosis Venn). One hoop is engraved "sleeping" and the other "waking". The intersection is a gap – an empty space of an unknown or ungraspable state. Nearby, a single resonance speaker is affixed to a large freestanding sheet of glass in the space, transmitting the sound of human breathing in a state of hypnotic induction that permeates both material and space, enveloping the viewer in a mesmerising rhythm. On the floor, four brass corners demarcate a square space. This work, titled Teleplastic Alloy (Witnessing Separates Itself From Seeing), is in itself a minimalist-inflected sculpture – with its own material weight and art-historical legacy – but its potential lies beyond the visible, in the activation of the "empty" space it carves out. In recent work, Mitchell has used barriers, plaques and signs to signal a threshold beyond which a spell has been cast or a sacred act has taken place. On the opening night of Other Explications, a person will have been anonymously hypnotised to see an object invisible to other visitors – just as the hypnotic state itself may not be perceptible to others in the room. An object will appear to the hypnotised person, and only to them, in the space demarcated by the brass corners. The work plays on the expectation, imagination and belief of the viewer, amplifying the already heightened mode of perception conditioned by the white cube.
On a shelf in the large gallery, a clamp device holds a single piece of paper: a tester strip sprayed with perfume. The scent is that of "an unseen object". For Mitchell, perfumes are molecular sculptures – weight, mass and dimensionality all shape the way in which they manifest to the viewer. They vanish soon after they appear, as molecules loosen from their complex structure to dissipate, cling, reform, swarm and spread thin. In this case, the artwork takes shape in the viewer. As scent enters the body, it disestablishes the boundaries that artworks traditionally maintain with the viewer; the space between object and body becomes something active and constantly in flux.
The small gallery contains a series of seven photographic prints. Taken on a microscopic camera, each contains a single piece of rheum, or "sleep" – the unconscious material produced by the body that typically gathers in the corner of the eye during sleep. If scent is conceived as sculpture that infiltrates the body, the photographs document the microscopic, crystalline forms produced automatically by the body.
Though immediate in their sensory appeal, Mitchell's concrete forms are conductors or residues of unseen forces or currents. Assembled from materials with their own rich alchemical ancestry – typically materials that have undergone a major transformation to arrive at their current state, such as alloys, perfume and glass – they tease out the potential for things to appear and disappear, and our capacity to perceive or imagine transfiguration.
