Chantelle Mitchell, Jaxon Waterhouse
June 19 – July 5
A good magician never reveals their secrets.
However, magic is recorded, transmitted, and sometimes, transmuted.
There is a similarity between the bird in the hat and the audience — both change upon passing through a threshold, some kind of portal. The bird emerges from possibility into being with its movement out of the hat, and the audience from a state of belief to disbelief upon entering the auditorium. There’s an agreement that takes place between all participants in the relationship (magician, bird, audience) that a trick is taking place and everyone is along for the ride.
This is a show about magic, a slippery and silvery substance – or, as Cixous would say, something or someone that one cannot forget, and yet is impossible to recognise clearly. Given its opaque nature and innumerable forms, magic as identifiable through magicians and illusionists adheres to a set of principles and tropes, a visual lexicon that invites a willingness to be deceived (or to at least play along), and signifies to us that magic is, has, or is about to occur. By staging the show in this particular arena, we double the manipulation like a fold, moving between the pleats of matter, from the visible to its nonvisible scaffold — the fabric that lies beneath the ready and tangible world and provides its strength.
Chantelle Mitchell (VIC) and Jaxon Waterhouse (NT) are long term collaborators, working together as Ecological Gyre Theory, a multidisciplinary artistic research project.
This project manifests as curatorial practice, experimental writing, sculptural and installation practice and academic research. Together, they have presented exhibitions for Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Blindside, IN/ARI, Grand Palais, Rubicon, Sawtooth ARI, Spectrum ECU, Cool Change Contemporary, Airspace, FELTspace, Watch this Space, MEANWHILE (NZ), and more. They work across archives, sculpture, photography and film, in a manner responsive to subject and context.
In 2023, Chantelle and Jaxon were declared the Monash University Art, Design and Architecture Gallery Curators in Residence, presenting three exhibitions and a series of programs with Australian and international artists in consideration of concepts drawn from the theoretical frameworks of anthropologist Tim Ingold. They have published across contemporary theory and ecology, and were co-directors of Ordinance, a contemporary arts space in Narrm.
