No Clock to Kill

Mitchell Anderson

SEPTEMBER 17 – OCTOBER 3, 2014

WFU alum (2007; studio art), Mitchell Anderson is a Zurich-based artist creating conceptually-driven work across a range of media. While concluding his studies, he began creating embroidered works, ultimately focusing on the replication of hand-written text. The “hand” of the writer evinced in the original text was important to Mitchell, as were the distortions and distance introduced as the artist transformed perhaps the most individual mark-making a typical person creates. These embroideries have evolved and are now sometimes shown in verso rather than from the “finished” side. The newer works, usually derived from historical reportings from the nytimes.com archive, or by famous and infamous individuals, raise issues of identity, slippage, and loss through mediation and replication. Frustrated text and broken or fabricated narrative characterize Mitchell’s works. He has created installations involving works employing various indigenous and pop-culture images in a variety of media. One series of works involves historic images of Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank, bisected, with the missing halves realized by child-artists in a class project found online by Mitchell. These pieces also show a recurrent interest in pairing in his work, while in this case raising issues of interpretation of iconic images and personas. The accretion of “meanings” projected on them over time are, perhaps in this instance ,stripped away -or maybe just further revealed- in the childrens’ drawings.

In early 2014, Mitchell opened Plymouth Rock, http://www.plymouthrockzurich.com/ in Zurich, an alternative gallery space in the circular center office of a repurposed parking garage, where he shows mostly the work of young and emerging artists. His ironically titled show, “Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker” was reviewed in Art Forum’s critics’ picks in June.

Mitchell Anderson graduated with a B.A. in studio art with honors from Wake Forest University, graduating in 2007. His most recent projects include Artist Run Space, in 2014 at Plymouth Rock, http://www.plymouthrockzurich.com/ in Zurich. His solo shows in 2014 include: Courting Aporia, Alte Fabrik-Gebert Stiftung fur Kultur, Rapperswil­Jona; How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,  at Chez Rosenkranz, in Zurich; All ­American Boy on Trial at Taylor Macklin, in Zurich; DOOM at Eichhalde 16, in Zurich; Some Europe in Texas, at 403 E. Texas in Marfa; Philomathean Society at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; Fl!ght Gallery in San Antonio; REBELS, (designed by Karl Lagerfeld) at FIAC, Paris; The Cosmetic is the New Cosmic, STUDIOLO in Zurich; The Brucennial in 2010 with the Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York; The Outer Space in Marfa, TX. During his time at Wake Forest, Mitchell had many exhibitions in Winston-Salem including Stitcheries in 2006 and Bodies and Objects in 2005 at 4th Dimension Gallery, and Mixed Meanings/ Hidden Messages: Selections from the Wake Forest University Art Collections at the Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery.