PRESS RELEASE
Dane Mitchell. Conservation of Mass
March 16 – April 14, 2013
Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal, 8005 Zürich
Opening reception: Friday March 15, 6 – 9 pm
Dane Mitchell takes dematerialisation to an extreme in his first exhibition with RaebervonStenglin, 'Conservation of Mass'. The New Zealand artist's work operates at the thresholds of the rational and irrational, the visible and invisible. He explores transitional states of being through alchemical processes, treating knowledge, experience and the past as properties with substance. Spells and smells envelop visitors to his exhibition at ReabervonStenglin, who must breathe in and conjure the artwork as much as they visually perceive it.
Entering the gallery, one is made aware of a past event that informs their present. In the doorway to the gallery a brass plaque has been laid announcing 'THRESHOLD. BEYOND THIS POINT THE SPIRITS OF THE PAST HAVE BEEN BECKONED', leading into an ostensibly bare room. Threshold to Beckoning (all works 2013) is a liminal piece which commemorates a spell cast by a pagan witch during the exhibition's installation. It's message not only alerts readers to a recent event (an esoteric ritual in which the artist also participated), but also allows for, in Mitchell's words, 'the possibility of an imagined, delusional, hallucinatory and illusory experience to take place.' The building's previous existence is further invoked in the gallery's back room where a strange sculptural silver form fixed into the wall emanates a strong perfume. Titled Epona after a goddess protector of horses, the scent has been specially created by Mitchell with Michel Roudnitska, a perfumier from the South of France, as a facsimile of the smell of a horse's stable, complete with overtones of hay in various states of decomposition and undertones of musky horse sweat.
Contrasting conceptual minimalist aesthetics with sensory abundance and witchcraft, 'Conservation of Mass' is a hybrid proposition — part rarefied art object, part occult mysticism. Its olfactory efficacy has a mechanical relationship to memory, penetrating the body on a molecular level and physiologically summoning the past. Whilst the substance of the exhibition's sensations are invisible and seemingly substance-less, they are attended by objects with evident physicality: the plaque and elongated arrow of the perfume dispenser; but also objects to be kept in the gallery's office — a hardwood box permanently screwed shut hiding all the materials the witch has used to make her spell (whose title, Ark of Spell Materials, subtly suggests Robert Morris's 1961 seminal work Box with the Sound of its Own Making) and a mirrored bell jar containing a further perfume dispenser sprayed each day with the scent. Mitchell's vessels for the intangible are thus brass, wood, glass, and silver — materials traditional both to alchemy and to sculpture, pointing to similarities between magic and art. In 'Conservation of Mass' there is continuity between the two. States change and sublimate — transubstantiating between the visible and invisible, palpable and imagined, sorcery and art — yet their hold stays the same.
Dane Mitchell was born in 1976 in Auckland, New Zealand. He received his Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland Institute of Technology, New Zealand, and received honours from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. His solo exhibitions include 'Dane Mitchell', Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin, Germany, 'The Barricades', Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (2011); 'Radiant Matter III', Artspace, Auckland, 'Radiant Matter II', Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and 'Radiant Matter I', Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (all New Zealand, 2011); 'The Story of a Window' (with Matt Keegan), Neon Parc, Melbourne (2010); and 'Minor Optics', DAADGalerie, Berlin, Germany (2009) which travelled to Art Cologne, Germany (2010). Group exhibitions include 'Gwangju Biennale 2012', 'Liverpool Biennial 2012', 'Contact', Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2012), 'Singapore Biennale 2011' and 'Busan Biennale', South Korea (2010). He lives and works in Auckland and Berlin.
