Modern Mythology — Aaron Mitchell

An artist, a teacher, a father, and a Torontonian who loves Iceland — and Akureyri in particular: Tell us briefly about yourself and your art, as well as your connections with the cultural life of the Capital of the North.
My connection with Akureyri started when I was a young Canadian artist, asked to teach drawing there. I took students to the shoreline and asked them to think about what they were actually seeing, and how experience turns into symbol. That practice of meaning-making grew into everything else: teaching, founding the Akureyri Centre of Fine Arts, building exchanges, and eventually developing the Modern Mythology Project.
Akureyri is also part of my inner landscape. Both my daughters were born there. I may have physically left, but I don’t think the fabric of my being ever did. I don’t spend a day without thinking about Akureyri and longing to be there. With my autism — what used to be called Asperger’s — that kind of connection and longing is difficult to quantify, and sometimes equally difficult to communicate.
When I returned to Akureyri in 2022, meeting you and developing a relationship with the University of Akureyri opened another thread, one that has continued to grow through teaching, conversation, and the Modern Mythology Project.

Your artwork has frequently tackled, touched on, and even toyed with compositional and conceptual elements that could be reasonably described as “humorous.” How would you describe “humour,” however; or, at least, those aspects thereof that have been most crucial for you and your artistry?
Humour for me is not really a punchline. It is the moment something lands — when you are looking at something and suddenly understand what it is you are actually seeing. That click can make you laugh or cry, and sometimes both.
Humour is how I stay above water. It allows me to confront absurdity, contradiction and even cruelty without drowning in them. This is where I find an affinity with your work. Humour is not the opposite of seriousness; it can be a way into it.

Theodor Adorno famously argued that the purer an artistic feat becomes, the crueller it gets, because it requires deeper and deeper degrees of psychological sublimation. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your art, or your understanding of artistic phenomena?
I think cruelty often arises in the encounter between the work and the viewer. The artist may create or position a symbol with a particular meaning, but once another person encounters it, the response is no longer completely controllable.
That doesn’t remove responsibility from the artist. We are responsible for the symbols we put into the world and for the conditions around them. But the work also needs that encounter to become fully active.
It makes me think of the old question: if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a work is never encountered, where do its cruelty, humour, beauty or meaning actually reside?
So I probably differ somewhat from Adorno in locating cruelty less in the purity of the artistic act itself and more in the relationship between the work, the artist, and the person experiencing it.

Are there any artists that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes characterising my philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true classics, and advise the reader to familiarise themselves with?
I am drawn to artists who unsettle reality and force us to interpret what we are seeing: Goya, Bosch, Bruegel, Duchamp, Dada and the Surrealists — Magritte and Dalí in particular.
Giacometti is especially important to me. There is something in his work about perception itself — the continued attempt to see, understand and represent something that never becomes completely stable.
I would also point toward Matthew Barney, particularly The Cremaster Cycle and River of Fundament — the latter certainly not being for the faint of heart — and Damien Hirst.
What connects these artists for me isn’t necessarily style. It is their capacity to destabilize what seems familiar and make the viewer participate in the process of interpretation: looking, questioning, unraveling something and ultimately trying to locate oneself within it.

Picture:
Aaron Mitchell, Principally Uncertain
Photography and mixed-media installation exploring quantum uncertainty, wave-particle behaviour, birth, chance and the unpredictable rises and falls of the “game of life.”