About the Exhibition

So Close Yet So Far: Paul Mitchell’s Transmedia Yearning – exhibition essay by Mario Trono 

When philosopher Slavoj Zizek looks for meaning in a horror film, he suggests we should ignore whatever specifically causes the horror. Only then can we see the real content—the real horror—of the film’s story.This critical maneuver yields interesting results: Psycho becomes a film about women’s lives in a woman-hating society, Alien a piece about exploited workers under capitalism, and The Cabin in the Woods a treatise on humanism dying under consumerism.

It’s an interesting test for art of any type.

So. What happens if one disregards the ostensible or most obviously apparent contents of Paul Mitchell’s prints—the fragments of faces and bodies, the letters limned by a line of ink, the cartoon fang, the facade of a house, the tangle of trees and fencing?

Answer: Evidence of the intaglio printmaking process itself having taken place, the scoring of surfaces and the subsequent insertion of ink into the resultant cavities, a materially intimate act. And it is that act—the forceful and intentional manipulation of media to get one thing into another—that reflects the broader theme of this exhibition, which is the restless, transmedia urge to explode out of form, content, representation, and materiality to forcibly (desperately? humanly?) connect with the Viewer-Other to ask, “ls this Darkness in you too?”

The other formal elements of this exhibition, beyond the prints, inscribe and express a hunger to enter into a state of co­-consciousness with Beholders of the work, as if a benevolent demon yearned to redeem possession and elevate it to sublimity, but, unable to bridge space and time, had to turn to art and was trying everything! The exhibition’s various forms of expression attempt collectively to vault the Void ‘twixt self and other.The abstraction of the prints and their associative transmogrification of the mundane muck of urban dwelling attempts to draw you into the mystery of an Other’s psyche. Text whispers here, and there, evoking typographic language and the auditory register in ghostly fashion, and since Word always implies Reader, it is another call to you,Viewer-Other, from the hungry demon beyond the representation, beyond the paper that stretches from ceiling to floor, ensuring you maybe see Him, maybe glimpse a shadow beyond surfaces, as light from windows and spots plays its games, the light of world paradoxically suggesting the dark of disconnection.

This transmedia, itinerant, and restless yearning for You finds further expression in the conceptual enactment provided by Amanda Schoofs, an enactment that underscores the show’s theme of graphical-textual dissemination as a form of yearning for connection. Her costume is “composed” of the exhibition’s versions of this theme, and since it materially spills onto the floor that the gallery-walking Other treads, it reveals itself as another bid to traverse the gap between representation and represented, and thus, between viewed and viewer.That the costume remains as a relic of that effort is another echo that a Self was here, moving in, through, and around the art, a Self calling to you through materiality made significant. Be not fooled by Schoofs’ mock, staged reading from The Plinth-Propped Book That Purports to Mean. (How could such meaning be stable when the “reading” is improvised?) Her performance is finally indeterminate in meaning because latent content is not the point.The overall exhibition is not about the yearning for connection, for the inauguration of the co­-consciousness that art desperately hopes can come into being. It is a debris field of signification that provides evidence of an attempt to make it happen.

Can it ever happen? Were it to, art would disappear, for there would be no need anymore to express oneself to other—Other would finally be Self. Today, here, now? We are at least able to embrace the consolation of Mitchell’s art, art that at least lets you know that the Other is thinking of you.