Artist
Carisa Mitchell
By investigating the ideas of self and others, I work towards how we talk about our placement and how this
informs our views and situates us within experiences. I am always in a perplexed state of this engagement
between self and others. As I keep finding myself in a state of ambiguity, here I challenge myself to sit in this
space as a place to be or even rest as new meanings are made. As a multidisciplinary artist, I approach my
subject from language to image in a mixed-media practice, using materials such as screen-prints, banners, neon, photography, video, voice, and performance.
When making new works, I am interested in our inability to fully communicate and explain who we are
while sometimes giving space to say nothing. I try to provide structure to this uncertainty but use my ideas
to drive the materials as I develop work around language, text, image, and contemporary ideas regarding the
gaps of self. I hope to do this by asking questions about what is lost in the ideal forms of subjectivity while
looking at the narrative based on self-explanation, auto-fiction, and ideas of self-censorship as I wonder how
the self is a reflection of the external.
I pose this as I wonder what material is in the voice, in our language, and how this turns into form, as I try to
ask what hospitality can be given to spaces as we evolve to give room to sit with oneself. I do this while using
pop-culture references such as Disneyland and Snapchat filters, witty humor, algorithmic text, text conversations, online questionnaires, spam emails, photographs, symbolic images, and online reviews