Red contusions stain a series of floor plans of the Rita Angus Cottage and the former Dominion Museum in Wellington, sites linked by Massey University’s Litmus artist-in-residence programme. Drawn by Dane Mitchell, resident artist through August 2006, the red rashes identify areas where a psychic commissioned by Mitchell detected paranormal activity. Channelling the medium’s message through video, tape recordings and drawing, in Thresholds Mitchell highlights the haunting presence of the restless repressed in modernist spaces and systems.
With his museological-mimicking practice, Mitchell was a canny choice for the site-specific, research-based residency. His practice involves using museological conventions against museums and the systems they symbolise. In Present Surface of Tell 2005 the languages of architecture, archaeology and geology are used to undermine the museum’s foundations. Mitchell says, ‘Strata are not stable and neither are the meanings of our museum collections, which are effectively our collective cultural memory’. Dust Archives 2006 was comprised of dust samples collected from museums and galleries around the world since 2001. Laboratory reports and photographs revealed the toxicity contaminating visitors’ breathing space. The invisible (if not immaterial) was given materiality.
What distinguishes Thresholds from Mitchell’s past work is that with the deployment of a psychic he has introduced Spiritualist research methodology—using technology to demonstrate the materiality of the immaterial—activating a curious tension between belief and empiricism, ours and his. This path leads the viewer to the irrationality at the foundations of Modernism, namely, the notion of a fixed, measurable truth and the emancipation of humanity through (Western) knowledge. Mitchell plays off Spiritualism, a Western, modernist belief system masquerading as science, against a post-modern ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard). As a post-modern subject Mitchell positions himself as a researcher