One of the most highly regarded contemporary artists to emerge from New Zealand in recent years, Dane Mitchell is currently back in his home country where he has been working on a trilogy of exhibitions at major art galleries across the country.

He has spent the last two and a half years inventing new fragrances with the famed French perfumer Michel Roudnitska. The third part of Radiant Matter at Artspace focuses primarily on the liquid, solid and vaporous states of perfume. The main gallery is filled with the synthetic scent titled The Smell of an Empty Space, which could be described roughly as a powerful, clean fresh tone that is a bit sharp and headachy.

Mitchell engages us with poetic suggestions and develops the fullness of olfactory experiences; the physical, visceral, remembered, and unknown qualities of smell. Perfume has the ability to appear as a liquid, gas or solid. It is these mercurial and molecular properties that Mitchell is interested in.

"Each of the three gallery spaces at Artspace explores a perfume, titled The Smell of an Empty Space, in a varied state of matter — liquid, gas and solid. Perfume is both a vapor and a liquid simultaneously, and offers the possibility for making the invisible active or 'charging' the invisible, which interests me. By definition the smell of emptiness should be an olfactive vacuum — an absence of aromas, yet this is an impossibility,” says Dane Mitchell

In each of the three galleries Michell investigates these different states; as a gas, a scent vaporising and filling the large gallery; liquid, a perfume is encased in glass to form objects which are both clinical and sensuous. The ‘solid’ state is held in a tension—a spray of scent on photographic paper slowly and imperceptibly exposing, held back with a red light. Mitchell’s interest lies partly in materials that can have multiple forms, the oscillation between the molecular the solid and the many transformations in between.

“At Artspace Michell challenges emptiness presenting a single perfume in three states, bound to different forms of consumption. The liminal spaces will be activated by the visitor whose presence will trigger the overlaying of the essence; not only will the gallery be filled by the memory of other places but also something will be taken out into the world as an invisible appendix.” Says Artspace Director Caterina Riva

Dane Mitchell was born in Auckland, New Zealand and works in Auckland and Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include Radiant Matter l, 2011, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, Radiant Matter ll, Dunedin Public Art gallery, New Zealand; Minor Optics, 2009, DAADGalerie, Berlin, Germany; Bending Light, 2009, Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand; Art Statements Art39Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Invocations, 2008, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia.

Dane Mitchell, Radiant Matter
Exhibition Dates: 5 July-20 August
Opening reception: Saturday 2 July, 1-6pm