David Mitchell

Perihelion 03

2022

David Mitchell continues to reject the assumption that photography is about representation. Pure abstraction and the process of image making are the subjects of his work. The British-born, Bangkok-based photographer makes large, luminous abstractions that look like stained-glass windows designed by a color-field painter. Created with found materials, such as fabric, paper, tape and sheets of colored plastic, he creates collages that juxtapose blocks of hot, cool, and sugar-sweet colors (the spectrum veers from fauve to Necco wafer), to make photographs that are at once orderly and trippy. The pictures are Mitchell's attempt to give form to the auras he experiences as a result of left-temporal-lobe epilepsy, which he was diagnosed with in 2004. Mitchell has been the subject of two solo exhibitions at Jim Kempner Fine Art. Lyle Rexer, the author of The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, wrote the essay for the catalogue which accompanied his second show. His photographs are in private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.