Dean Mitchell | Our Own Ghosts
In a new immersive exhibition, The Erosion of Time: A Digital Compilation of Works by Des Lucréce and Dean Mitchell, on view September 6, 2025, to April 30, 2026, at the Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan, Kansas, technology animates and adds movement and duration to the imagery of two artists. It augments the storytelling of the art and makes life, as the artists see it, larger than life. Alongside the immersive exhibition, the MoA+L showcases Dean Mitchell’s paintings in a traditional wall-hung show, Heritage & the Human Condition, from August 20, 2025, through March 8, 2026, giving audiences the chance to see his art in its original form.
Sam and Dolly, 1995, oil on panel, 30 x 48.
Time—the beauties of its effects and the ravages of its passage—is, in my mind, the true, profound subject of Mitchell’s paintings. When we feel time most keenly, the pull of the past in the present abstracts us from the moment. Memory becomes moment as we find and lose ourselves in a nether space between and outside of the ticks of the clock. In these memory moments we often feel our bodies on a level that is part cellular, part spiritual. Mortality calls to us from afar. If we are not alone, someone near and dear to us is likely to say, “Did you hear me?” We are likely to reply, “Hm?” We are, in these memory moments, our own ghosts, in a way, not listening because we aren’t there, not fully, haunting ourselves in web-strewn passages of “what ifs?” These moments aren’t necessarily a function of age but rather, a function of history.
In Mitchell’s paintings, these hauntings reverberate from personal histories to the history of the nation and outward to the history of humankind. It’s a shame that art history continues to speak in terms of realism and abstraction. To call Mitchell’s paintings realistic because their surfaces resemble surfaces we know, or that we imagine we know, is to lessen them. What they express isn’t reality but truth. Unfortunately, in English, the word “truism” is anything but elevating. Should we create a new label—idealism, perhaps? Or perhaps, we should just acknowledge the limitations of labels and move on.
Urban America, 2018, acrylic on panel, 11 x 16.
Looking at how the museum describes Mitchell’s interests, work and career and you will see the conundrum: “[The Erosion of Time] showcases Mitchell’s rich body of paintings, prints and drawings of rural and urban environments, portraits and still lifes, portraying enduring values of roads traveled along with personal narratives. Mitchell’s hopes for humanity, through his experiences and observations of the world around him, deserts, plains and open skies. Here, the immersive space stretches out into an endless horizon. The viewer is surrounded by layered projections of Mitchell’s most expansive scenes sun-bleached deserts, dry fields, distant mesas stitched together to form an imaginary landscape where time feels frozen. A reminder of the timelessness and spiritual weight of the American terrain as seen through Mitchell’s eyes.”
When we hear the words “immersive exhibition,” we think of Monet, Van Gogh, Klimt, painters whose sunflowers and lilies and fields of gold came to life in bravura strokes and rich, chromatic palettes. The America that Mitchell sees and paints, and the ways in which he paints it, might, at first, seem at odds with the immersive medium. Because his subjects range across “different spaces of the American landscape—New Orleans, New Jersey, Arizona, California,” sometimes, he says, his audiences are unaware of one another. He goes on, “The curators of The Erosion of Time were interested in my whole body of work. Because it’s a curated show, they were looking for something different, not just romanticism. Work to engage viewers and encourage tough conversations.”
New Orleans, Higher Grounds, 2005, watercolor, 20 x 30.
Have a look at portraits like BETWEEN THE WALLS and a landscape like GRAVITY, which will be on view in the gallery show, and you will see what the artist means when he says that the American experience he explores—whether it is the Black American experience, the Native American experience or any other—“isn’t only about poverty. It’s also about the frailty of the human body, the process of aging. There can be some nostalgia, but I want people to be uncomfortable with my work. I see the cruelty, the absurd quagmire that our social constructs create. So I ask myself: How can art break down those social constructs? Can what I do challenge you to think deeper? Can my art move us to a higher plane, spiritually?”
Between the Walls, 1996, oil on canvas, 24 x 36.
In BETWEEN THE WALLS, an aging man looks out at us, trapped by the panes of worn abstraction that constitute the “walls” in the title. Time contains him claustrophobically, yet sunlight finds him somehow. It isn’t resilience—the ubiquitous word of the day—it’s the triumph of sheer existence, of continuing to exist despite the weight of the past and present that haunt the man’s eyes. In GRAVITY, the little arrangement of buildings, as Mitchell composes them, is squeezed between an unbroken sky and an unrelentingly flat ground. The flat planes that are characteristic of modern and contemporary painting, here, take on the literal weight of meaning in the work. Still, even in the stillness, humanity persists.
Continuing to exist. Carrying on. “Commonality and continuum” in Mitchell’s spaces, as he sees them, lie precisely in the fact that his work doesn’t “tour pretty places. It has a haunting beauty that shows both the struggles and the triumphs of life—how life is.”
Gravity, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40.
The immersive experience highlights the continuum Mitchell conveys in his work. It’s difficult to imagine here on these pages, but a description of the technology, according to the museum’s text, might help. The museum explains: “Mezmereyz, fondly known as ‘The Mez,’ is the Museum of Art + Light’s groundbreaking, multi-sensory, state-of-the-art 21,500-square-foot immersive exhibition environment with the purpose of enticing even the most novice of visitors to the arts. Using the latest in projection technology with the power of 108 Epson projectors spanning across approximately 37,000 linear square feet to produce 188,000,000 pixels of animated beauty, The Mez works to transport visitors through a fully animated, artistically driven tour to new places, spaces and times where the projected story delves deep into the artistry, artist or works themselves. The MoA+L is committed to pushing the boundary of traditional art forms by developing its own method of artistic creation utilizing cutting-edge technology to tell a diverse array of artistic stories that are sure to redefine the way museums interpret the art world.”
Mitchell’s work features in various “scenes” in the immersive exhibition. In the opening scene, SKETCHES, over 90 of the artist’s pencil and ink drawings offer “the sense of walking through the inner landscape of the artist’s imagination. At the center of this environment is an animated figure based on one of Mitchell’s own sketches, an abstracted version of [Mitchell] himself walking slowly through the immersive space. This ghostlike presence serves as a guide through the creative mind, moving gently amid the oversized works that inspired his paintings and perspective.”
Carolyn, 2018, acrylic on panel, 5 x 7.5
Mitchell’s “ghostlike presence” is more than a guide; his presence is the mirror image of those ghosts we become in our memory moments, a ghost that completes those ghosts. Shimmering from line to form, Mitchell’s art gives shape and life to the memories—personal, national and human—that haunt him, and us.
The scene LANDSCAPE “captures the quiet vastness of deserts, plains and open skies. Here, the immersive space stretches out into an endless horizon. The viewer is surrounded by layered projections of Mitchell’s most expansive scenes of sun-bleached deserts, dry fields, distant mesas stitched together to form an imaginary landscape where time feels frozen.” This description reminds me of the pleasure I found some years ago while writing a few paragraphs on one of Mitchell’s landscapes of the Arizona desert. In it, a tiny house stood at the edge of the shadow of an enormous mountain. A simple composition, or so it seemed. But I had spent some time out in the desert, away from Phoenix, and had seen such lonely outposts. I understood instantly that the painting was about the vast differences between the scale of human time and the scale of geological time. The mountain was, is and will be, while the little home and the people who dwell there are transient, temporary and ephemeral.
Scene 1 – Sketches. Original artwork by Dean Mitchell; digital compilation by Sydney Bouhaniche, the Museum of Art + Light creative director of immersive exhibition.
Scene 4 – Landscape. Original artwork by Dean Mitchell; digital compilation by Sydney Bouhaniche, the Museum of Art + Light creative director of immersive exhibition.
Scene 8 – Musician. Original artwork by Dean Mitchell; digital compilation by Sydney Bouhaniche, the Museum of Art + Light creative director of immersive exhibition.
In MUSICIAN, the final scene in the exhibition, a kind of Preservation Hall Jazz Band plays across a neighborhood that is simultaneously sun-drenched and deeply shadowed. Music surprises, relieves and reminds us that creativity can arise, flourish and nourish us anywhere, at any time, if we look for it.
Thinking about what sort of counsel he might offer to young artists, especially young realists who see technique and surfaces as the goal or art, Mitchell recalls his own youth, “I was looking at one of Degas’s dancers, at her leg across the barre. And it wasn’t right, anatomically. But artistically, it was right. It was human and intuitive. I have always had an eye for abstraction. But I tell young artists, ‘You can learn technique. But no one can teach you how to see.’”
Grandmother, 1987, acrylic on board, 10 x 15.
Looking, at last, at GRANDMOTHER, an early work, the kind of painting that propelled Mitchell’s career, you see how Mitchell sees, how he has always seen. In GRANDMOTHER, I see my own mother in her last months. I see her in the hair brushed straight back, in the eyes looking back and away, in the mouth curved down at the ends, at dignity struggling against time, against inevitability. I might struggle to look at that painting if it came to life in an immersive exhibition. I know I couldn’t look away.
Museum of Art + Light
Heritage & the Human Condition, August 20-March 8
The Erosion of Time: A Digital Compilation of Works by Des Lucréce and Dean Mitchell, September 6-April 30
This story appeared in the August/September 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine.