Dane Mitchell - Crafty
August 10 - September 3

What's wrong with mastery?

Everything!

And proving that point well and truly, Auckland based artist Dane Mitchell produces a miniaturized version of the Kiosk itself this month, painstakingly, if clumsily constructed from card, glue and tape, minus the slick engineering, and looking a little unsteady on its feet. Playful, critical, and painfully observant, Dane's work has often drawn on the surrounding art world for its subject matter, interrogating and exploring the norms of cultural practice today and placing art world icons and institutions under investigation. In Crafty he looks forward to a perhaps inevitable deterioration of the Kiosk's physical structure, ever vulnerable to the ravages of posters, taggers and bird poop, yet simultaneously looks back to an era when a bit of card and some felt-tips were the perfect vessels for creative output.

And if the miniature ever needed a home, a place to rest its tricky little head, it would undoubtedly be the Kiosk. After all the Kiosk is the gallery's own equivalent of the miniature in art, most obviously due to the dimensions of the given space, but also in its demands for detail and precision. Simply in the way in which the Kiosk articulates its viewing public as the viewer peering down on object is suggestive of a Lilliputian relationship between giant and human. The proximity of the viewer allows the eye to scrutinize for detail, precision and realism, and the enclosure frames and defines the work as a fixed and self-contained entity.

Dane Mitchell's exhibition in Kiosk is part of The Physics Room curated series.

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