Dane Mitchell's exhibition Minor Optics is showing at the daadgalerie, Berlin to 28 November 2009.
"Mitchell's investigations are primarily concerned with the marginal phenomena and transitions that largely escape ordinary (visual) perception. Using methods of scientific logic and experimental demonstrability, Mitchell leaves clues to these marginal areas and invents forms for making them visible and displaying them.
"The exhibition Minor Optics at the daadgalerie consists of two new works by Mitchell, both of which, in different ways, refer reflexively to the art space. Several electrostatically charged metal plates placed in the gallery space accumulate over the course of the exhibition dust particles, which can be seen on the glossy surfaces of the plates. In the study of the environment of art and the art space, dust represents all the things, organic and inorganic, that can occur, since almost nothing is free of dust.
"Working with the perfume maker Michel Roudnitska, Dane Mitchell developed a synthetic scent that corresponds closely to the smell of an empty exhibition space. Mitchell is trying to analyze the difficult-to-describe world of smells and thus provide information about what was previously unnamable or invisible.
"On the one hand, the exhibition Minor Optics draws attention to the spaces in which art is stored and presented and their conventional effects—very much in the spirit of a critique of institutional 'customs and pathologies'. At the same time, in the light of the exhibition's title and with Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of minor literature in mind, it introduces a tendency
to deterritorialization that blurs the boundaries and expands the limits of perception."
daadgalerie press release, 22 October 2009
Images: Dane Mitchell, Minor Optics, 2009, installations views, daadgalerie, Berlin.
Photographs: Kryzsztof Zielinski/DAAD
