Dane Mitchell

In Hochstapler — German for 'impostor' — Ayşe Erkmen, Dane Mitchell, and Trevor Yeung present works that masquerade.

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Erkmen's Hochstapler/Melbourne Version (2022/2025) transforms humble bubble wrap into architectural authority. Sealed with tape and stretched between floor and ceiling, packing material assumes the gravity of a classical column while remaining transparently itself—neither structure nor decoration, but something that borrows the language of both.

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Mitchell's Mother of Pearl (2024) traces the century-long life of Perlamutrovy, a phantom island that existed on maps of Svalbard until its 'undiscovery' in 2017. Through an exchange with a cartographer, Mitchell maps the territories where the map and the terrain converge.

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Yeung's Swinging Floater (2023/2025) gives form to the eye's own deceptions—those small, worm-like shapes that drift across our vision when we look at bright skies. In suspended mulberry paper and silk, these forms respond to atmospheric changes, becoming indicators.

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Each work operates as a kind of placeholder, marks territories of uncertainty. They suggest that imposture might not be about deception, but about the slippery nature of seeing—the way things can be present and absent simultaneously, the way we fill gaps with assumptions, the way the body participates in constructing what we think we see. Amid increasing concern with authenticity and verification, Hochstapler proposes the impostor as potentially revelatory of appearances.

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Text in Dane Mitchell Mother of Pearl, 2024 reads:

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Dear Melinda Clarke,

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I'm writing to you in the hope that you might be open to discussing an undertaking — to an intimate act of holding.

I recently travelled to Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean to not see something. I went to see an island that isn't. Perlamutrovy, which translates from Russian to mother of pearl, is a phantom island off the coast of Graham Bell Island, close to Svalbard.

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As I am sure you are aware, a phantom island is one that has appeared on maps and has subsequently been found to not exist. Perlamutrovy was un-discovered in 2017 up to which point it appeared on maps — named and charted on all cartographic documents of the territory since the early 1900s. Still today, flicking between terrain and satellite imagery on Google Maps the now unnamed phantom island appears and vanishes in front of our eyes. Whether Perlamutrovy sunk back into the ocean or rose out of the imagination of a cartographer is still unknown.

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When in Svalbard I took a photograph of the sea out of which Perlamutrovy was believed to rise, and I enclose a copy of this for you. It is with this photo that I hope you might be willing to perform the intimate act of holding.

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My unsolicited request is that you might fold this photo up and place it in your pocket and take it with you wherever you go. Tucked in your pocket it will map the traces of your movements, perhaps operating as a hidden terrain — a pearl in your pocket — a phantom on the map, in the ocean and the cartographer's pocket alike.

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I enclose a self-addressed envelope for the return of the image of Perlamutrovy, at which point I will send you a framed copy of the same image that has been in my pocket.

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Sincerely,

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Dane Mitchell