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October 19, 2012
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(via Michael Dean at Herald St (Contemporary Art Daily)) “Dean’s practice begins and ends with language; to deploy a classic structuralist term, it would be difficult to find more “writerly” work than his. For everything he does is a direct byproduct of writing, of language, and it absolutely requires a thoroughly writerly viewing experience—in that it compels an active engagement with the textual underpinnings of the work, in which deciphering is all but indivisible from writing it. Superficially, such work would seem to lend itself with alacrity to an essay. But that is hardly the case: existing on the threshold of language, the work naturally puts up a kind of essential resistance to more conventional syntactical and narrative structures. In other words, writerly as it is, it is not necessarily asking us to have our way with it, on our own terms, but rather to go to it, to meet it at that threshold and engage with it on its own unique, writerly terms.” Michael Dean - Words by Chris Sharp (on KALEIDOSCOPE) “Allowing meaning from a seemingly private source to become uncovered is central to Dean’s practice, which – aside from sculpture and photography – includes poetry, short plays and publications (the latter of which have accompanied each of his exhibitions). Exploring the transmutation of language from the spoken word to its graphical representation and on to its subsequent reading, Dean’s work marks the different relationships between the word as idea and material form. The cryptography inscribed in the sculptural and photographic pieces is another relational manouevre: Dean sees this as a tactic, whereby he ‘writes’ himself into the work just enough for it to exist; he then erases himself, leaving viewers to find a meaning within these mute objects that isn’t prescribed. His practice explores the mediating position of language between the author and the reader, as well as the active-to-passive-to-reactive flow of the force of a word upon an object and how the meaning of that word is then transmitted.” -Frieze Magazine | Michael Dean

(via Michael Dean at Herald St (Contemporary Art Daily))

“Dean’s practice begins and ends with language; to deploy a classic structuralist term, it would be difficult to find more “writerly” work than his. For everything he does is a direct byproduct of writing, of language, and it absolutely requires a thoroughly writerly viewing experience—in that it compels an active engagement with the textual underpinnings of the work, in which deciphering is all but indivisible from writing it. Superficially, such work would seem to lend itself with alacrity to an essay. But that is hardly the case: existing on the threshold of language, the work naturally puts up a kind of essential resistance to more conventional syntactical and narrative structures. In other words, writerly as it is, it is not necessarily asking us to have our way with it, on our own terms, but rather to go to it, to meet it at that threshold and engage with it on its own unique, writerly terms.”

Michael Dean - Words by Chris Sharp (on KALEIDOSCOPE)


“Allowing meaning from a seemingly private source to become uncovered is central to Dean’s practice, which – aside from sculpture and photography – includes poetry, short plays and publications (the latter of which have accompanied each of his exhibitions). Exploring the transmutation of language from the spoken word to its graphical representation and on to its subsequent reading, Dean’s work marks the different relationships between the word as idea and material form. The cryptography inscribed in the sculptural and photographic pieces is another relational manouevre: Dean sees this as a tactic, whereby he ‘writes’ himself into the work just enough for it to exist; he then erases himself, leaving viewers to find a meaning within these mute objects that isn’t prescribed. His practice explores the mediating position of language between the author and the reader, as well as the active-to-passive-to-reactive flow of the force of a word upon an object and how the meaning of that word is then transmitted.”

-Frieze Magazine | Michael Dean

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