For artist Eric James Mitchell, this year’s Pride theme of Imagine One Better World sees him actually crossing into other worlds to make the imagined real. With a background in sculpture and painting, Mitchell’s new works for Orphans Of Delirium are pieces of reversed street art – he takes photographs of street-scapes then, using Photoshop, ‘draws back’ into these photographs to add characters and denizens which are, basically, otherworldly.

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The whole technique plays on the current trend of new cartoon fuzzy logic, where artists are producing illustrative caricatures of childhood cartoon heroes, more often than not for a street setting. They then use computers and computer software to enhance the drawings. The result is distinctive – almost approachable icons of yesteryear warped with paranoid or sometimes psychotic tendencies. They appear loveable and cuddly, but slightly disturbing too. Mitchell, a construction worker by day, took some time out from building buildings to chat with OUTinPerthabout his imagined orphans. 

OiP: How did you come up with the title for the exhibition?

I was taking photos out of a car in San Francisco and when I examined one of my photos I saw on the side of a newspaper stand a flyer for a play called Orphans Of Delirium and I was up one night drawing these pictures – which involves a process of actually drawing back into photographs using Photoshop – when I saw this flyer and thought Wow, what a great title for these works.

OiP: The technique by which you ‘draw back’ into your photographs, could you explain this process?

I take my cue from people like Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. Ernst did a technique called frottage where he would take rubbings from textured surfaces and from those rubbings create automatic hallucinations. He’d essentially build up a collage of weird characters and landscapes.

I manipulate my photographs only to the point where I can allow other people to see what I’m seeing. I’m not making up what I see – and by saying see I’m not talking in a mental health dynamic, more a creatively intuitive one – but just letting people in on it, and I do so through this cyber frottage. Essentially I’m creating modern day series of Rorschach images.

It’s a matter of invoking another world for others to see, an application of Italian Metaphysics. Such painters used to paint very mundane industrial landscapes. But it was what they brought out of such scenes which made their work so poignant – they set the stage for a very dark and treacherous play. My images aren’t quite so gothic, but the characters conjured certainly are otherworldly. Their plot whilst here? You’ll have to attend the exhibition to find out.

OiP: So what can your audience expect?

I’ll be producing a set of two dimensional photographic prints of my Orphans. These will be available for purchase. They’ll also be accompanied by a collection of my wall scrap sculptures. The correlation between these two distinct series is that they both take place in an urban landscape. The Orphans usually appear on highly textured walls, where I find them naked and then dress them up with my love.

The wall scrap sculptures are a series of three dimensional sculptures which I have created from found objects. I work in construction so often find intriguing things on various sites. In a sense, these sculptures are a variation on the Orphans, not so much brimming with ego and identity, but certainly an amalgamation of lost and discarded parts. I hope to bring both elements together to create a space of refound abandonment, or possessed dispossession.

Orphans Of Delirium [Part 1ne…There’s No Face Like Home…] opens Friday October 19th @ The ArtistRE on the corner of Carr and Fitzgerald Streets in West Perth from 7pm. The exhibition then runs Saturday and Tuesday through to Friday October 26th from 11am to 5pm. Visit www.myspace.com/ericjamesmitchell for more details.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

[Editor’s note: The similarity in Scott-Patrick and Eric’s surnames is not a coincidence. Apparently their parents planned it that way…]