Dane Mitchell

Closely related to Piero Manzoni’s Base of the World, Homage to Galileo, 1961, which aimed to suggest that everything was art and that the gap between art and reality an illusion, Weight of the World extends this idea. Where Manzoni invited us to stand upon the earth-as-artwork, Weight of the World asks us to sense ourselves within the earth-as-measurement, neither separate from nor identical to the mass that contains us. In this encounter with the world-as-itself, the work 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.