How do you describe something whose features are featureless? Like the back-country roads of Illinois, whose shallow plains are easily discarded for their simplicity. How do you tell a story? Weaving colors and symbols too often ignored by routine living, like walking familiar city blocks, and suddenly arriving at our destination.

Sweet Sweet Bitter Sweet is an exhibition of photographic and neon artworks by Carisa Mitchell that examines storytelling and its inherent ambiguities; of how we get lost in subjectivity and the intimate settings we share. What guides us is Eros, a bittersweet feeling of desire that envelopes Mitchell’s references of tarot, poetry, and personal experiences. The ideas in Jungian psychology, language around the personal and the collective, and writings of Anne Carson, are integral to this exhibition.

Carisa Mitchell is a Chicago based artist. Her practice uses multiple mediums to evoke the poetic quality of ambiguity in both subjectivity and language. She received her BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA at HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et Design), Geneva in 2017. In 2017 she was the prize-winner of Red Cross – Genève Art Prize with Collectif MNGH. In 2018, she was a prize-winner for New Heads Fondation BNP Paribas Art Awards (Switzerland). See Less See Less

Here I leave you with one last work in the show, an audio piece that would have been a public performance if Covid wasn’t around. Here I bring parts of my work full circle to put us in a dance and a daze with language. A place in which perspective becomes disoriented in gestures, taking you somewhere but also nowhere in particular. The performance text addresses a line that Anne Carson starts her essay Symbolon with; she quotes a Rilke poem, "What Birds Plunge Through Is Not the Intimate Space." The whole poem, as in Carson's essay, leaves us with an understanding seeking the other half, the thing which holds us in place, as without restraint we become lost. I position us in that space, wondering if we can grasp on to meaning as we sit in a place of double meanings, its misunderstandings, and dreamlike logic.

The performance work “If you see me, you must know me” leaves a final question in a state wondering where it ends, how one gets from one place to the next, or where do we position ourselves inside that free-fall feeling. I address in my text ideas of auto-fiction, a space in which I prefer not to say anything, while also realizing silence and misdirected connection means something.