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Kate Mitchell

Future fallout

Adam Geczy
Eyeline 82
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The video that forms the sort of centerpiece for Kate Mitchell’s exhibition, Future Fallout, involves a strange building in the middle of nowhere with the word ‘psychic’ painted across the top, the façade covered in cartoonish icons of the spiritualist trade (a crystal ball, etcetera). The artist rides up to it on a bicycle, enters, and with typical grand guignol, the edifice falls apart. The work is clearly a coda for the rest of the exhibition, about anticipation, the tenuousness of belief and that it is our perceptions and convictions that shape reality. Or to use the words of the novelist J.G. Ballard, ‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind … We live inside an enormous novel’.

After the building falls down, the artist, unharmed and undaunted, shrugs and moves on. Thus the ‘Psychic Shop’ is a symbol of the fragility of systems of belief, but also the ease with which new forms of belief can be reconstituted and remade. The artist’s equanimity, her nonchalance, suggests that she is an intermediary between the phases of destruction and rebuilding. She is the avatar that exists in between the spaces where we situate knowledge and expectation. For everyone has a Weltanschauung, a world view, that is a cobbled together mixture of empirical reason, superstition, assumption and premonition. We perhaps dare not stare that truth too readily in the face. But it is the conviction in this view that drives us. With this simple video Mitchell suggests to us a world of straw men and toy houses—once the veil of Maya is drawn back it reveals yet another veil, and so on into recurrent indeterminacy.

Yet the

Kate Mitchell, Future Fallout, 2014. Installation view. Photograph Toby Dixon. Image courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney.

Kate Mitchell, Future Fallout, 2014. Installation view. Photograph Toby Dixon. Image courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney. 

Kate Mitchell, Future Fallout, 2014. Installation view. Photograph Toby Dixon. Image courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney.

Kate Mitchell, Future Fallout, 2014. Installation view. Photograph Toby Dixon. Image courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney.