Dane Mitchell

Closely related to this work, Piero Manzoni’s Base of the World, Homage to Galileo,1961 aimed to suggest that everything was art and that the gap between art and reality an illusion, yet Dane Mitchell’s Weight of the World (North), 2015 neatly extends this idea, so that we may encounter the world-as-itself, and suggests that regardless of the transference of matter and energy from one form to another (be it through the production of  art objects or the production of new life) the planet-object remains unchanged and impervious.

Astronomical Smithereens, 2015 was produced by collecting the dust off of the lens of the Auckland Observatory’s astronomical telescope. This dust was then handed to a micro-biologist to culture bacteria from this material, resulting in the subsequent photographic documentation produced by the artist.