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STEPHEN
DEAN
Dates: October 27 – November 30, 2001
Opening Reception: Saturday October 27, 5–7 pm
Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present our second solo exhibition
of work by French-born, Brooklyn-based artist Stephen Dean. With
this exhibition Dean broadens the scope of his transformations of
the mundane into the exquisite.
Working with objects of everyday life, Dean decontextualizes them,
thereby forcing us to look at them anew. His book totems titled
Accounts are columns of striated color, books stacked with their
spines against the wall, so only the colored edges of the pages
can be seen. That they are books at all is only apparent after concentrated
looking, however, after we are drawn in by the brightly hued bands
given sculptural form. Only after our engagement with the work do
we come to realize how Dean has favored the visual and physical
properties of the books over their linguistic properties, thus giving
them new meaning. "His work," writes Olivier Kaeppelin,
"is the story of an appropriation of statements and measuring
systems of reality (words, lexicons, graphics, abacuses, books)
by an act that dispossesses them of their powers, to employ them
for other ends."
Similarly Dean presents us with color swatch books emptied of any
functional purpose, existing simply for our visual pleasure. He
has fanned each book out into a circle and pinned it to a board
with colored pins, setting up a subtle relationship between the
pins and the color swatches. Instead of codifying and isolating
colors as the books were originally intended, each work exists as
a whole, the interaction between colors taking precedence over their
categorization.
Dean heightens this distinction between form and function in his
photographic/sculptural work Off Hand. A digitally printed image
of a climbing wall covers one entire wall of the gallery, while
actual climbing keys hand painted by Dean jut out from this two-dimensional
surface. Separated from their original context by their bright colors
and the fact that they are objects against a flat image, the keys
take on a life of their own as they begin to resemble pieces of
organic sculpture. The play between the flat wall and the three-dimensional
objects causes us to question the reality of what we are seeing.
Which has more artifice: the two-dimensional representation of the
wall, or the "real" climbing holds that cannot be climbed,
the complete picture or the disconnected objects?
Also on display is Pulse, a video that Dean shot in India during
the festival of Holi, which celebrates the arrival of spring. For
Dean, Holi, "an orgy of chromatic pleasure in which the celebrants
douse one another with colored powders," serves as a point
of departure for his further exploration of color. Stills from the
video capturing pigment-saturated participants will also be shown.
Through his work, Stephen Dean affects a transformation; the familiar
becomes strange, the ordinary, fantastic, and for a moment, the
world becomes a much richer place.
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