Event
David Mitchell: BoundariesPost an Event »
The Dryansky Gallery
January 29 - March 12, 2015Info
2120 Union Street San Francisco, CA 94123 Google Map »
Opening reception: Thursday, January 29, 6-8pm
The Dryansky Gallery is pleased to present Boundaries, an exhibition of large-scale color photographs by British born/Southeast Asia based artist, David Mitchell.
Boundaries marks the artist's first solo exhibition on the West Coast, featuring non-objective photographs selected from his on-going Abstract bodies of work. Prints from his 2012 series and new works from his 2014 series are being shown for the first time. The geometric nature of these works aligns with his interest in urban form, planes and space where he employs his own abstracted and reductive aesthetic language, incorporating his fantastic sense of color, line and shape that reaches beyond the confines of reality. In Boundaries, the conventional notion of photography being about representation is replaced with contemporary non-objectivity and draws on the imagination, challenging what we have known photography to be.
Mitchell employs a studio practice in which images originate with sketches, that are then translated into collages and assemblages, and finally chronicled through the lens. The staged constructions are photographed and discarded post-production, leaving only the final print as evidence. He interprets his perceptions of urban surroundings — such as architecture, form and space — with emotional reverence. His intent is to create symbols and ideas rather than literal depictions; the images are not “pictures of something”, but are “the something” in and of themselves.
This exhibition of hard-edged abstracts from the artist’s on-going non-objective series where the two dimensional plane is about structure and division of space, or “boundaries,” echoes Piet Mondrian, Ilya Bolotwosky, Burgoyne Diller or Mark Rothko; but these masters are not Mitchell’s direct inspiration. Mitchell draws from the urban environment where he seeks and finds inspiration in Post-modern Brutalist architecture experienced from interior as well as aerial points of view. Exploring subterranean parking lots and train stations or bird’s eye views of painted game courts inform Mitchell’s mysterious geometric compositions. His works are minimalist and formal, yet ethereal and moody, balancing the concrete with the surreal. Boundaries reveals the power of the two dimensional surface and the way it can beguile us.