Mitchell Messina’s Orderly Chaos
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Mitchell Gilbert Messina, an experimental South African artist, has an intuition for blending satisfactory design with intentional artistry.
He recently added co-founder of the artist-run Under Projects gallery space to his list of constantly growing roles. Messina has the ability to express complex ideas by methodically simplifying information through iconic imagery; you can sense the lengths of consideration sitting behind each decision in any one of Mitchell's artworks and/or exhibitions.
His 2016 work, Cape Times Mitchell Edition, is an example of this. With 18 pages of a newspaper being fabricated by himself to essentially make the whole thing revolve around him—from the comic strips, all the way to the tv guide.
This piece was created for an exhibition based on the term "The Filter Bubble". THE TERM IS BEST DESCRIBED AS THE CONCEPT OF BEING digitally force-fed things that relate to you through an algorithm. Mitchell thought it would be funny if he applied that concept to old media, exploring the idea that a self-obsessed person could get a self-obsessed newspaper, in which every article was about them.
It's this degree of absurd commitment which makes Mitchell stand out, paired with his seamless incorporation of comedy. Throughout art school, Mitchell saw humor as an interesting way to convey his ideas. He was aimed at making work that could spark a reaction, explaining that if someone was to even chuckle in response to his work, he knew that it had at least activated something.
A unique element of Mitchell's more recent work comes from the way he repurposes pre-existing art galleries and artworks, to represent inanimate creations as characters within his animated narratives. Examples of this can be found in his 2018 short film Lil Slugger Goes To Zeitz.
In the interview I had with Mitchell, he spoke a bit about this. "I started animating Nicholas Hlobo's artwork and I thought that it was wild that we don't play with each other's work in that way. There's all this incredible work being made but once it's finished, it's ostensibly dead and presented as a static thing. If animation is the ability to make something move, other people's work becomes very interesting to engage with, because you can take anything and give it personality through its movements."
Not having done an exhibition for a few years now, Mitchell has been focused on co-founding Under Projects - an artist-run project space. "I think the lack of project spaces has created a weird hyper-professionalisation of art-making, when there are only spaces where art is for sale, people start to only think of art as something to be sold. Those weirder off-spaces are lacking and it forces people to think more narrowly about what art-making can be," Mitchell comments.
The sad thing is that these kinds of spaces happen to be where he got a lot of his early inspiration, as they're much more focused on experimentation and pushing the possibility of how art could be displayed and interacted with. I think it's a healthy representation of that same orderly chaos. A safe space for a general audience to support work that pushes boundaries and gives artists a sense of freedom within their chosen constraints.
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