Beyond Baroque 681 N. Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291. Gallery & Bookstore are open Fridays & Saturdays from 12 - 6 p.m. and Wednesdays & Thursdays 2 - 6 p.m. by appointment. For appointments call Ph: 310-822-3006

In this newer work made specifically for the Proxy Gallery, the spirituality of nature is explored. Of course, nature in its broader form includes everything, human nature and the natural world, but here it is somewhat stylized and given form through choice of colors (yellow, red, white, and lots of blue,) and choice of elements. Found pictures of flowers, stones, planets and sea creatures are presented facing us to emphasize their center.

What the flowers, stones and planets have in common is that they all have radiating circular forms with centers, a theme that Robin Mitchell has cultivated in her painting practice for many years. Equally influenced by Indian gardens, Indian Kantha textiles and her own painting, she seeks to make sensory the beauty of nature.

The other important gesture in the work is that the collage extends to the exterior of the Gallery “walls” as well as the interior, forcing us to see the gallery as a material box that it is possible to examine from the outside as well as the inside.
Mitchell fills the Proxy Gallery on eight sides with a collage of printed photos of flowers, agates, planets and marine creatures. Some of the collaged paper is glued down flat, and some is attached in such a way, that it creates a three-dimensional diorama.

Mitchell understands the Proxy Gallery as both restrictive and liberating. She presents “the world in a box” reminiscent of Victorian tunnel books where a flat image unfolds into three dimensional layers. At the same time the box is restrictive, since the world is not cubical. Her solution to this contradiction is her act of fictionalization through form: The colors are coded as joyful, the shapes are treated as easy to understand. But even though we can see flowers, the flowers constitute an abstraction in their play with photography, flatness and depth.

We have here photographs of flowers, stones and planets, stuck to the horizontal and vertical surfaces and also extending out from them; layered and at different distances and scales to one another. The energy of all these flat but three-dimensional representations effectively constitutes a resistance to the cube and an erasure of its internal corners.

Finally, if we see the photographed work in a computer screen or cell phone, it becomes once again, flat. The photographic technique of removing the background intentionally presents the gallery out of context and without a scale comparison, rendering it again abstract.

(photo credits: Robin Mitchell)
http://www.robinmitchell.net
Annetta Kapon for Proxy Gallery