Jarrett Mitchell: The Dawn Of The Birth Of Right To Life vs. The Law Of Death at Art Organism

I caught the opening of Organism's first show (barring that Rist video I am abso. devastated to have missed- oh pippi pippi pippilotti!...I've heard rumors that there will be more off you in the states soon though) the Wednesday before the hustle/haze of first Thurs. Glad to have the chance to contemplate, because this was the first really thought provoking show I've seen here so far (though I loved that fairy tale business as Liz Leach last month, and had I not been super busy moving I'm sure there is more to say about the PAM biennial). Mr. Jarrett Mitchell, it seems, is interested in deer- Deer. Now, I will be the first to say I have seen enough antler chandeliers and general pseudo-ironic-urban-woodsey-ness in the past two years in Chelsea and Williamsburg to last a life time (which isn't to say I don't think Marc Swanson's work, for instance, is hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly poignant...but as I was discussing with my favorite renegade curator this summer, a group show poking at this trend was sorely due). So I entered with both trepidation of more of the same, and anticipation of potentially timely commentary. Background information would suggest that Mitchell is familiar with this aesthetic, having shown at Deitch Projects, but also could inject it with a bit of reality, hailing as he does from Louisville, Ky.

A charmingly taxidermied doe, bursting through the walls of the temporary white cube framed by a laurel of ripped sheetrock, inaugurate Mitchell's "The Dawn of The Birth of Right To Life vs. The Law of Death." This titled phrase is repeated on several of the obsessively, but awkwardly, worked faux-naive drawings and paintings following that stuffed and mounted (really? I didn't check the medium on the checklist) creature. These strictly visual works nicely complement the fake scientific method of the maps, documentary close-ups of road kill, and interviews with Portlanders about their encounters with deer that make up the rest of the exhibition. The artist's hand is heavy here, seen in the smartly selective clumsiness of the map multiples, the degrees of google-image-search bad resolution in the c-prints of road kill, and the bitingly humorous timing of cuts in the video footage. Mitchell here is both the objective observer of this apparently epic battle, man vs. nature, life vs. death, and the delightfully self-deprecating explorer of well trod territory. The question- is this serious or trivial, universal or particular?- flickers throughout the exhibition reconfiguring its terms and repositioning its stance as each work plays off the others, and internal tensions mount. The v. detailed pencil drawings and multi colored pointelism are all surface, but superficial in a way which asserts the crucial importance of that layer. The bollywood music and kaleidoscope-computer-manipulated abstractions that punctuate each interview in the video work simultaneously assert a perversely carnivalesque spectacle and- perhaps because of the vague shadenfreude that emerges from this very decoupage- a sense of shared tragedy in the absurdity of, well, you know. It is at the same time very funny, and when you pause and listen to the stories, shockingly serious. The grandiose title and disco abstractions shift from Good Fun to a quirky and poignant take on the unimaginable. Behind the luscious surfaces, the glass eyes, the witty editing, the crafty draftsmanship, is mortality- figured in a gunshot wound, in a rotting carcass, in a late night collision...or perhaps in lethal injection, assisted suicide, electric chair, or back alley abortion. And this ambivalence between the deadly serious and the ironic kitsch is the perfect articulation of the anxiety in the face of morbid inevitability. Through Mitchell's deft and subtle handling the triteness of death and the shallowness of "deer shows" gives way to a hauntingly nuanced and refreshing statement.