Villa Toronto
Toronto
16.01.15 – 23.01.15
with Dane Mitchell
Dane Mitchell undertakes investigations into the physical properties of the intangible, and visible manifestations of dimensions beyond our direct line of sight. Typically his work takes form whereby seen elements become conductors of unseen forces or currents — they tease out the potential for objects and ideas to appear and disappear, and our ability to perceive or imagine transfiguration.
In his practice Mitchell kneads together two perspectives. The first 'what we feel we know' through empirical evidence (including the sphere of particles, forces, thermodynamics, mass, weight). The second is an activation of 'what we can't know' through employing that which is philosophically and epistemologically problematic (including witchcraft, perfumery, hypnotherapy and conceptual leaps). In the merging of 'what we feel we know' and 'what we can't know', a space is opened up within and between these perspectives, exemplified by Weight of the World, 2014 — a work that turns the planetary mass into an object, stating its weight as a form. Weight of the World (an upturned set of scales) reveals the planet to be an entity in orbit that exists as a closed system, with immunity to states of material change to its overall weight, following the law of conservation of mass — something we feel we know, yet in practice, can’t.
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 Mitchell’s work neatly extends this idea, so that we may encounter the world in itself, and suggests that regardless of the transference of matter and energy from one form to another (be it through the production of an artwork, or the production of new life) the planet-object remains unchanged and impervious.
In his practice Mitchell kneads together two perspectives. The first 'what we feel we know' through empirical evidence (including the sphere of particles, forces, thermodynamics, mass, weight). The second is an activation of 'what we can't know' through employing that which is philosophically and epistemologically problematic (including witchcraft, perfumery, hypnotherapy and conceptual leaps). In the merging of 'what we feel we know' and 'what we can't know', a space is opened up within and between these perspectives, exemplified by Weight of the World, 2014 — a work that turns the planetary mass into an object, stating its weight as a form. Weight of the World (an upturned set of scales) reveals the planet to be an entity in orbit that exists as a closed system, with immunity to states of material change to its overall weight, following the law of conservation of mass — something we feel we know, yet in practice, can’t.
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 Mitchell’s work neatly extends this idea, so that we may encounter the world in itself, and suggests that regardless of the transference of matter and energy from one form to another (be it through the production of an artwork, or the production of new life) the planet-object remains unchanged and impervious.
