RM Vaughan: "Winter of Contentment" Eye Magazine. February 7-13, 2002

Winter of contentment:

MITCH ROBERTSON - Original Copy. Gallery TP

If Mitch Robertson has any identity issues, they are probably worries over how to squeeze even more art out of his identity. Robertson has mined his childhood, his friends (including me), his travels, his secrets and, rather hilariously, his fast-track art career to make one funny, self-referential and self-deprecating show after the next.

For his latest exhibit, Original Copy , Robertson has shifted his gaze, at least ostensibly, away from his own mirror and created a series of photographs that celebrate well-known, even world-famous, places.

Visiting such landmarks as Loch Ness, Churchill Downs and the World's Largest (plywood) Dinosaur in Drumheller, Robertson sloppily photographed the tourist traps in a style that mimics the official postcards available on-site. The resulting show has enough theoretical layers of representation, re-representation and aw-shucks puzzling over the (literal and figurative) location of celebrity to keep an MFA theory class busy phrase-slinging for a decade.

Wry and achingly clever, Original Copy generates the same response as David Lynch's multi-reality film Mulholland Drive. You'll either revel in the semiotic hairsplitting or shrug the whole thing off as a time-wasting self-indulgence.

Either way, it's refreshing to see Gallery TPW showing photographic work that is decidedly not precious, not in the least concerned with silver gelatins and pinholes, and evidently not made by a professional photographer. Somewhere, Freeman Patterson is pulling his hair out, softly lit filament by sharply focused follicle.

- RM Vaughan