• The Art of Jon Mitton is so diverse as to almost defy categorisation. I first became aware of him in 1990, when he arrived at the Holography Unit of the Royal College of Art in London, most probably in a cloud of dry ice with strong back-lighting and accompanied by an insistent electronic soundtrack (though I missed that bit), where he soon distinguished himself as the star student of his year.
Since then I have seen him work in video, animation, performance, design, multimedia, sculpture, painting, construction and, most recently, lenticular imaging. Versatile, or what?
Holography is the element of his work that first attracted me, and it is notable that, even within the confines of that technically demanding straitjacket of a medium, the variety of imagery he produced was impressive. The first examples were pure Op Art; vibrant kinetic images that derived from and fed back into the light show work he had been doing with Echo & The Bunnymen. Stop-frame animation techniques enabled him to produce holograms with a cartoon-like feel, often accompanied by a subtle menacing undertone. Pulsed lasers offered him another opportunity for expression. Whatever techniques became available in that period of discovery, Jon absorbed them and integrated them into his arsenal of styles.
Perhaps this is the most consistent trend in Jon's work - a mastery of technique and its subjugation to his will. That, and the strength of ideas behind the work. It is often all too easy in a technical medium for the work to be just about the technique, but in Jon's work the concept is predominant. Ideas matter to him.
After the RCA, Mitton became part of a Liverpool-based collective entitled F (UK), whose video, performance and multimedia work culminated in the notorious Hardcore Holography exhibition of 1994. This collection of animated holograms, derived from short videos of a frankly sexual nature, was displayed in a set of beautifully designed motorised frames of Jon's construction - the Time Machines. These machines rocked the holograms to and fro so that the viewer could just stand in front of them and see the sequences play back and forth over and over again. Each machine had a small engraved plaque with the word Time Machine engraved upon it, looking for all the world as though it had been unscrewed from H.G.Wells's original device. Recalling this suggested to me the thought that Jon Mitton may himself be a Time Lord, moving back and forth through time and space, gathering ideas and techniques and transporting them into the Now, where we, mere mortals, observe his highly original handling of them with awe and wonder.
Jon's holograms often seem to shift between the futuristic and the retro, frequently in the same piece, while some of his constructions, like the Artlamps, have a peculiarly timewarped air about them, where Oxfam chic collides with kitsch in a surrealist explosion. Now it seems fitting that he is working with lenticulars - a medium which has glided through the 20th century like a sleek, plastic dolphin, breaking the water at roughly 30 year intervals but seldom previously catching the imagination of art world.
Most people are familiar with lenticulars as those 'winky postcards' from the 1960s or with the more recent use of the technique in advertising displays. Typically, Jon's early body of work with the medium subverted those expectations by focussing on humdrum domestic interiors devoid of inhabitants, where a landscape of porcelain and formica became the setting for a 3-D drama of cleaning products and the ephemera of daily life. More recently he produced a series of figure studies, one of which I am proud to own, in which sensuous female forms interact with optical patterns to produce images at once abstract yet familiar.
From what I gather, the restless Mitton gaze has switched again, from the domestic to the community and its inhabitants, and I look forward to seeing what his take on it will be. I'm confident that it will be original and well-executed, engaged yet observant. I encourage you to savour the experience - with the awareness that the Time Machine will be whirring in the alley, impatient to transport its Master elsewhere.
Jonathan Ross
Gallery 286, London
April 2008
Copyright Jonathan Ross 2008