Mitch Mitchell is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor in Print Media at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. His studio practice encompasses many forms of image and physical production utilizing print in sculptural, performance and various installation forms. For the past 7 years his works focus on exploring psychologies of labour and familial histories, most recently the personal/global narrative of psychological aftermath of atomic bombing on Hiroshima.
Exploring material culture related to labour and industry, he has been defining for his practice a “Democratic Material Strata”, an archive of materials such as newsprint, copper, rust and flour, common to global human interaction but neglected due thecommonality of trade. His current visual research project “BOX FACTORY” merges sculpture, paper, print and object/industrial design to construct kinetic-based performative sculptures and actions intent on performing for the audience mundane tasks commonly associated with working class cultures within production industry.
Trinity Cantos: 1 Cup, 1 Cup Flour, 1 Cup Rust is a video work, the first in a collection of 3 videos, elaborating on Mitch Mitchell’s investigations into labour history, identity, time, alchemy and the intersections of global vs personal narratives. The 3 video-works in the project create subtle metaphors of physical and mental transformations through quiet gesture and material chemistries. Process becomes a symbol of time and human condition. The suite of videos all elaborating on the act of manipulating materials that the artist deems “Democratic” in nature into a final object, an object being mundane in its own right as viewed by modern world; this being bread, plaster moulding and mechanics coveralls. The Democratic materials used are part of a larger collection in the ever-growing artists’ library of common and mundane materials (copper, flour, rust, paper, plaster, sugar, water, labour, etc). These materials are shared throughout the world and are commonly viewed as raw and discreet but in the artist view they are very polar in that they have tangled global narratives that are both beautiful yet damned based on culture and economy.
Mitch Mitchell takes these materials and re-investigates the historic conversations around them via the transformative use of process and labour crafting objects and actions that are counterintuitive to its nature (a loaf of bread made of rust, a hot air balloon made of quilted paper, an architectural molding made of sugar). With the Trinity Cantos suite of video works Mitch Mitchell lets the viewer witness the the dramatic evolution of some of these materials to create in real time bread from rust (1 Cup Flour, 1 Cup Water, 1 Cup Rust), bespoke mechanics coveralls made from paper (Tailor) and a Victorian architectural molding made from sugar cane (Blanc Structure). In conjunction to the video works actual sculptures are produced for exhibition similar to the creations in the video works.
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