Curtis Mitchell is a visual artist who works in video installation, sculpture, and photography. His recent work centers around setting up visual dialogues in an ongoing series of visual installations. Mitchell has had solo exhibitions at venues including MoMA PS1, the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; the Sculpture Center, Cleveland; KX Gallery, Germany; Galerie Marc Jancou, Zurich; as well as White Columns, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Esso Gallery, and Martos Gallery in New York.

Mitchell has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world, including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, the Landesmuseum, Austria; the Mucsarnok Palace of Art, Budapest; the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; and the Mexican Cultural Institute in New York. His works are in several public and permanent collections, including the Walker Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Lannan Foundation.

Question:

Acts of process seem paramount in your earlier work but not in the modernist etymology of word, not by revealing the making of the thing but rather reacting to it, altering the thing’s physical state by responding to its raison d’être. Through a kind of performance, you reveal the “thing’s” function, by using it up, giving it another meaning other than its inherent one. Building on this process, how do you describe your current interactions with cinema/film/video, the stuff animals, and the audio manipulations in relationship to your earlier exploitations of pristine (virgin) objects and materials?

Answer:

Yes, my work in the studio is focused on a process in which I react to an object, thus creating an object. I always see the studio as a site for two things to relate. The extent to which I feel pleased by a piece is determined by how much the final work reflects a relation between the author and the original object. This relation is always constructed of impetus and result, both determined by the original object. I see it as a way of making an object real to me.

Untitled (Voided) 11, 67″ x 47″ Oriental rug, burned and cleaned, 1990

Early on, the process evolved from a mimesis of natural and cultural interventions on the object to an enactment of subjective interventions. The process became more personal, more driven by desire.

This other thing in the room isn’t really confined by form. Each thing is a seized and redirected brand name pulled from mass culture. The processes continue: The objects still evoke desire, and so I react. And as to movies, we lose ourselves in them, sometimes happily. So my wish is to “enter” the movie scene, to be embodied by it.

Meltdown 18, 121” x 70”, Altered C-Print, 2002

Pulp, dimensions variable, Video projection, video projector, dvd player, Beethoven’s 7th (excerpt), 2008