Kate Mitchell
In Time

In Time is a 24 hour video in which the artist rests, hangs and clings onto the minute hand of a large clock, 4 x 4 metres in diam­e­ter, ardu­ous­ly count­ing out a full 24-hour cycle so that the video becomes a func­tion­al time-keep­ing device. In stand­ing in for and becom­ing time, Mitchell ulti­mate­ly exam­ines its essence as it pass­es before her. Dressed in blue work over­alls, Mitchell appears like a main­te­nance or qual­i­ty con­trol work­er, mak­ing sure every moment is up to muster. The para­dox: even if it is deemed to not be up to scratch, a re-wind to re-live is impos­si­ble, the moment has already passed. Time con­tin­ues, regard­less of whether it is approved of or not. Through Mitchell’s absurd exam­i­na­tion of time, we are remind­ed to be atten­tive to its ever con­stant pass­ing; how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

In Bad Luck Rearranged I and II, the shards of an acci­den­tal­ly bro­ken mir­ror have been col­lect­ed, paint­ed and recon­fig­ured in an attempt to reverse bad luck through an aes­thet­ic ges­ture. The pho­tos serve as a reminder that we have the abil­i­ty and agency to har­ness our own pow­er to turn bad luck around.

In the Secu­ri­ty Blan­ket suite, five hand made blan­kets: Funer­al Plan, Health Insur­ance, Income Pro­tec­tion, 24 Hour Hot­line, Super­an­nu­a­tion, speak to the desire for secu­ri­ty and the inabil­i­ty to have/​hold onto it. These ​‘adult’ blan­kets align them­selves with var­i­ous forms of insur­ance and pro­tec­tion, which aim to pro­vide sim­i­lar solace in a world of change and uncertainty.

In How to Be A Gen­uine Fake, Mitchell appears, brow fur­rowed, absorbed in read­ing a book titled How to be a Real Human. A riff on the self-help genre: the hard­er we work for an authen­tic state of being, the fur­ther away we find ourselves.

Two neon squig­gles depict the artist’s brain­waves caught in two dif­fer­ent states of mind: What Think­ing About Art Looks Like and What The Real­i­sa­tion That This Thought Is An Art­work Looks Like. The cur­rents of the brain are enlarged in an attempt to locate their point of ori­gin and dis­sect their meaning.

How This Work Was Made com­bines the action of art-mak­ing with the result­ing art­work, trans­fer­ring the focus from one to the oth­er. It stands as a form of self invert­ed analy­sis, a cat­a­logue of its own process of being. It reveals the com­mit­ment and risk that the artist embraces for the work.

Col­lec­tive­ly this body of work address­es every­day wor­ries; time, mon­ey, work and the future. The pieces in the exhi­bi­tion stand togeth­er like mark­ers of the pure effort of time itself, reveal­ing that the great­est effort of all is to actu­al­ly be at peace with time.