Tropic of Gemini
2016
Tropic of Gemini involves a journalistic paradise-hunting in the Caribbean.
Review
Tropic of Gemini distills a quest to find and inhabit paradise into a three-hour performance, in which Mitchell walks on a customized treadmill before a video image collage of oceanscapes: boat rides, beach scenes, airplane flights, and walks through tall seaside grasses.
The state and status of paradise remain ambiguous in Tropic of Gemini. Mitchell positioned herself front and center before her video projection, which at times produced satisfying optical illusions, as the artist appeared, for instance, to be walking along a dock, away from water or, alternatively, to be walking into the ocean from the beach. Would a morning jogger pass behind her? And was Mitchell approaching or leaving the paradisiacal landscapes that backgrounded her walk? The continual strolling, the circuitry of the treadmill belt, made the viewer wonder about the work required to attain “paradise.”
The video installation backdrops a three hour performative walk on a downsloping treadmill performed at the Atlanta Contemporary.
These more recent, more intimate performances convey an eroticism reminiscent of what Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of Text (1975), wrote about the flash of skin, the wrist between the glove and the sleeve. Tropic of Gemini’s is, similarly, a grown-up sensuality.
– Art Papers