Dane Mitchell

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Commemorative Plaques, 2008
Bronze plaques, stone
Approximately 330 x 500 x 300mm each

Dane Mitchell’s work regularly asks us to check our convictions, in serious tones and without a comic guide to cue our response. Convictions are not just those things we hold dear, the clarity of right and wrong, but the sense of occasion for which a bronze plaque offers a memorial. 

These plaques are well positioned in the outdoors. They use the visual language of authority (bronze cast) to address in the language of public speech (commemoration) an occasion worthy of our attention (public atrocity or good deed). Only in this instance Mitchell’s plaques commemorate an event that sounds suspiciously like the trailer of a B movie or Mills & Boone romance – ‘maligned intent’, ‘irreconcilable difference’, ‘shattered dreams’ or ‘abandoned hope’. But according to the conventions of their form a casual visitor may contemplate the possibility of an actual event, and why not a shattered dream for that matter. Somehow Mitchell’s plaques open up the possibility for a myriad of human interactions, dramas and loss of a less public kind, now invisible to the human eye but palpable within the landscape. This is Dane Mitchell at his best, the proverbial trickster who forces us to stare at a plot of grass and reimagine it as a site of interpersonal crisis.

Like much of his work, this series of plaques relies upon the language of reason to redirect viewers to an unknown possibility, while the very introduction of this possibility in turn destabilises its originating authority and reason. Set in the landscape in the terrain of public sculpture, and its heritage of commemorated, sanctioned and civic-minded art, Mitchell’s work also tackles the pursuit of earnestly collective and agreed-upon aesthetics of public art. His work acknowledges that being disagreeable in public art is also rare and unruly, especially with limited means. But the better for it, these bronze plaques are careful not to make a fuss of art’s flamboyant risk-taking, instead they remind of the subtle reinventions of the mind, which gave rise to all forms of adventure.

Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques
Commemorative Plaques

More from this artist

Artist Bio

Dane Mitchell lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. He trained at the former Auckland School of Arts (now Auckland University of Technology) before teaching there for a decade.

Mitchell’s practice explores the physical properties of the intangible, making invisible forces perceptible through scent, sound, and material form. His work blends conceptualism and minimalism, often engaging with themes of disappearance, transformation, and sensory experience.

He has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and internationally, including solo shows at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, Lyon; and Auckland Art Gallery. In 2019, he represented New Zealand at the 58th Venice Biennale with Post hoc, a monumental installation cataloging countless lost and vanished phenomena. More recently, his work has been featured in Meanwhere at Mossman Gallery, An Unbroken Surface at Gertrude Glasshouse, and MILKSTARS at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery.

Mitchell continues to push the boundaries of perception, drawing audiences into the unseen and ephemeral.