2025
The Imponderables, 2025
The Renshaws, Meanjin Brisbane, Australia
Ursus Maritimus (for Loneliness and Introspection), 2024
Intermediate bulk container, homoeopathic remedy
1000 x 1000 x 1000mm
Headspace, Letter to Sea World, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
850 x 110mm
Mother of Pearl, 2024
Giclee print, frame, aluminium
2 x 850 x 110mm (photo 255 x 170mm)
Ursus Maritimus (Polar Bear) 1, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
1097 x 1510mm
Ursus Maritimus (Polar Bear) 2, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
1097 x 1510mm
Polar Bear Zoo Enclosure Air Sample, 2024
Stainless steel, air
235 x 235 x 340mm
Letter to Global Seed Vault, 2023
Giclee print, aluminium
850 x 110mm
Sun Hole, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
150 x 100mm
Moon Hole, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
150 x 100mm
Global Seed Vault, 2024
Giclee print, aluminium
2 x 1115 x 2010mm
The Imponderables (Sol/Sun & Luna/Moon), 2023
Lab stirrer, homoeopathic remedy
400mm x 360mm x 120mm (each stirrer)
100ml (each remedy)
Dane Mitchell's exhibition The Imponderables explores loss, containment and future-contingent propositions by way of an island that is not, and a place that does not.
Continuing Mitchell's longstanding interest in the evanescent nature of loss, absence and the porous boundaries between natural and artificial worlds, The Imponderables offers a perspective on our relationship with matter and the environment – and on estranging attempts to protect the future from our present selves.
Mitchell's exhibition orbits Svalbard, a remote, stateless Arctic archipelago: a proto-heterotopia where birth and death are prohibited; an un-country that both reflects and upends; and a disappearing natural habitat for the polar bear – held locally captive in the manufactured facsimile of their Arctic home at Sea World on the Gold Coast, just 75km from the gallery.
The project includes a series of letter-works – a form the artist first employed in the late 1990s – alongside new sculptures and photographic works, including high-resolution scans of the doors to the Global Seed Vault, a doomsday vault buried in the side of a mountain in Svalbard. These images, produced using a flatbed scanner, document the threshold between our incendiary present and a buried future.
Through the use of technology, pseudo-pharmacology, performative gestures, sharp reflection, and vanished and entrapped materials, Mitchell's work draws connections between the containment of nature in zoos and museums and the Global Seed Vault's paradoxical status as both hopeful safeguard and apocalyptic proposition.
The Imponderables contends with legacies of preserving, apprehending and comprehending the world, while reflecting on Svalbard as a place both on a precipice and in purgatory. It invites viewers to consider the complex interplay between preservation and loss, legibility and illegibility, and our place within a rapidly evolving present and future.