STEPHEN DEAN
Stephen Dean's work whether installation, sculpture or video investigates color as a crucial element in understanding objects and especially experiences. Color reigns as an essential force that links perception to understanding. Through compositions of color, Dean ascribes new meaning to the ordinary common objects.
Dean presents Bloco, a video taken from above the streets of Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, which was also exhibited at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. Dean's vision shows us crowds so dense that to wonder by ones self would be to loose identity. In response, groups travel in tight uniformed packs that form highly colorful packs of wild organic mass rubbing violently against contrasting groups. Rhythmic music compliments to movement of the crowds and lends a cultural authenticity to the environment.
Dean was born in 1968 in Paris and now lives and works in New York. He has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe. His work is in many private, corporate, and public collections including Yale University Art Gallery, the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, and the collection of Banque Société Générale.
ANNE DELEPORTE
Through photography, painting, video and installation, Anne Deleporte creates mixed media visual micro-situations. Her collections of images emphasize the enigmatic quality of vision, while undoing photographic certitudes.
Through her exploration of surfaces, Deleporte has captured images of herself on reflections of glass for the self-portrait for the Freud Series. Intellectually charged and challenging, the works come alive with color. In the search for self awareness, Deleporte reminds us that photography is an act of seeing distinct from everyday looking, seeing is intentional, and by closer attention to surfaces, we can learn to see more deeply within. In the creation of images, Deleport demonstrates that the reality of external surfaces are portrayed just as the suggestive and ironic as inner worlds.
In her work with pages of newsprint affixed to the wall, Deleporte creates Photo-frescoes by painting out a majority of the information, leaving a celestial blue ground dotted with images. These silhouettes, once detached from their context, level the hierarchy inherent to different types of representations, such as calligraphy, geometric shapes, objects and historical reproductions. The floating images hang like constellations in a blue sky, pregnant with meaning but devoid of context.
Deleporte has exhibited in, amongst other venues: Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris; The Drawing Center, New York; The New Museum, New York; Museo del Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; Galerie Xippas, Paris; Hales Gallery, London. Her work was recently included in the exhibition Paris a Shanghai: Fifty Years of French Photography at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China. The Santa Monica Museum will feature her work in their upcoming exhibition Dark Places.
Anne Deleporte was born in France in 1960. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Paris with her husband, artist Stephen Dean.