TINA MITCHELL
As above, so below
2024–25 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE EXHIBITION
March 7–27
Museum of Art | Pratt Munson Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7, 3–5 p.m.
As above, so below, explores our foundational understanding of primary colors alongside architectural spaces both interior and exterior, real and imagined within a framework of childlike playfulness and material exploration by bringing together drawing, painting, fibers, craft, and installation.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings, sculptures, and installations explore play, vulnerability, and the inevitability of change. I construct spaces that feature colorful doorways, holes, nets, and cells that invite an intimate view of the way colors and materials flow into each other and create unexpected visual experiences. My work creates and manipulates representations of space in order to explore their possibilities for expressing joy, excitement, or fear.
My compositions focus on entrances and exits that allow me to engage the viewer through motions of discovery and wandering. I repeat certain forms in the work such as boxes leading to nets that drop into pools of liquid, or interwoven strings and threads flowing into holes and archways. In my recent work, I am using this imagery to explore new materials such as textiles and ceramics to create haptic responses that invite the idea of touch. I use an expansive color palette of vibrant primaries and soft pastels to entice feelings of joy and safety within a fantasy playroom wonderland. The eye moves through a network of pathways and invents a way to enter or exit while discovering how to approach change with the freedom of play.
My work is inspired by my experience as an art educator as well as my interest in how my search for freedom coincides with a search for what safety and fear mean. I emphasize the combination of sculpture and painting as the threshold between accepting reality through objects and also rejecting predetermined structure through painting and application of color.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tina Mitchell (b. 1998, New York) is a visual artist currently working in upstate New York. She works with paint, paper, fabric, wood, clay, metal, string, and other found materials to create two- and three-dimensional sculptures and installations. She is interested in using imagery of doorways, nets, holes, and cells to explore internal and external themes of play, systems, and freedom. Mitchell earned an MFA degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Munson College of Art and Design in Utica, N.Y. As such, she teaches in the community arts program, exploring abstraction through experiments and critical thinking.
Mitchell's artistic practice is inspired by her passion for art education and experiences teaching art with many ages and institutions. Greatly influenced by the teachings of painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus school, her artwork manipulates representations of space in order to explore their possibilities for expressing joy, excitement, or fear and emphasizes the combination of sculpture and painting that blurs pictorial space with physical space and rejects predetermined structures through painting and application of color.
Artist Info: tinamitchell.org | tmitchell@prattmunson.edu
Take an art class with Tina! Ages 10 - 14 | After-school Art Journal - Session 2
The 2024–25 AIR Program is made possible with generous funding by Sunithi S. Bajekal.
