by Scott Gleeson

In Western cultures, the wilderness has historically been constructed as a liminal site occupying the borderland between an array of culturally defined binaries: reason and irrationality, visible human existence and the unseen spirit realm, the sacred and the profane, urban and rural. The art of Jacob Mitchell examines the liminal space of the wilderness as a portal to the subconscious world of dreams and memories. His hallucinatory landscape photographs subvert the ostensible documentary value of lens-based images, consciously embracing the medium's potential for digital manipulation through commercially available softwares like Photoshop. Inspired by his study of psychology and 20th century Surrealism, Mitchell seeks to create immersive visual imagery onto which viewers may project their own fantasies and narratives. His strategy of openness to the subjectivity of the viewer constitutes a turn from Surrealism's interest in expressing the dreams and subjectivity of the artist's unconscious mind. Thus, Mitchell's practice must also be considered within discourses of cinema, surveillance, and narrative photography from which the artist draws methods and visual tropes. Peripheral Vision discusses with the artist his inspirations, training, and current projects.

Describe a work of art that has been meaningful to you or influential in some way.

I remember the first time I saw Gregory Crewdson’s “Beneath the Roses” series my freshman year of high school. My photography instructor included a few of the pieces in a presentation he made the first week of class. Those photographs blew me away, it was the first time I fully realized photography was more than documentary, more than representational. It was cinematic, it was emotional, and it was strange and unknown. I was seeing everyday things constructed and lit in such a way they began to take on new meaning, new life. I loved movies, and films tap into our unconscious, informing our conscious mind through visual cues and sounds, etc. Crewdson was using a single frame of narrative imagery; his works resembled cinematic stills and dream imagery. So I took that feeling those photographs gave me and I implemented it in my own work. I want to redefine the world through my images. Make it new, strange, and uncanny. I definitely think that first impression had a huge impact on the way I make photographs and the way I see things in camera.

What is the first work of art you remember experiencing as a child? Was there something about the experience that influenced your practice or decision to become an artist?

The first work of art I have memory of was Mark Rothko’s black paintings at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I believe we were on a field trip in elementary school. At the time, I had no idea what I was looking at. Growing up I went to church, I knew what a chapel was. Rothko Chapel is very different. It’s heavy. The structure and Rothko paintings have gravity to them. Every time I visit I can’t seem to look away from any of them for very long. It’s different than a museum. I have since learned the significance of those pieces and the space itself. But as a kid, dwarfed by those canvases surrounded on eight sides, even then it was a fascination with something unknown, a need to understand what is in that blackness. Those paintings sit with you forever, and I can only hope to give my own work as powerful a presence.

How old were you when you decided to become an artist? Describe your training and how it has contributed to your current practice.

I started taking photography courses in high school. I didn’t begin taking myself seriously as a photographer until I was in community college and my photography professor, Troy Huechtker, encouraged me to pursue a BFA at a state university. So my artist training started at the University level with the art core classes. The best thing about those early courses is every art major has to take them. So from the beginning you are collaborating and working next to people from all visual art and design backgrounds and everyone is at differing skill levels. Pavel Romaniko was my first professor in the photography program at UNT and he provided some of the best projects I worked on in my undergrad career. In particular, his Topics course on the moving image really broke me out of the norm of working with still images and working on my own.