About
Mark Dean began looping appropriated film in the 1970’s while studying photography and painting, and in the 1980’s extended this technique into music; these practices were eventually combined in the methodology for which Dean became recognised as a video & sound artist from the 1990’s onwards, through early solo shows at City Racing and Casa de las Conchas, and international touring exhibitions including Video Vibe and Black Box Recorder. In 2009 Dean received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, followed by a retrospective exhibition, The Beginning of the End. Dean’s work has been commissioned by institutions including Barbican, ICA, and Imperial War Museum, reviewed in journals including Artforum, Art Monthly, and Frieze, and is held in museum collections including Leeds Art Gallery, Mudam Luxembourg, and the Saastamoinen Foundation, Finland.
During the 1980’s Dean performed in bands and music has remained an integral part of Dean’s art practice, with looped and layered sound samples often providing the structural basis for video works, as opposed to being an overlay or backing track. This treatment of music as material is paralleled by a consistent use of film as objet trouvé, and Dean’s work has been curated alongside that of other ‘appropriation artists’ including Andy Warhol and Richard Prince; however, Dean’s use of appropriation differs, at least from some of the more reductive interpretations of such work, in that it is based not on a theory of the emptiness of images, but rather on a theology of kenosis, or self-emptying.
Following teaching posts at the Ruskin School of Art and Goldsmiths College, in 2010 Dean was ordained in the Church of England, and since this time has continued to work as an artist and priest, serving as chaplain to University of the Arts London, coordinating Arts Chaplaincy Projects, and developing liturgical art events including Stations of the Cross and Pastiche Mass. In 2017 Dean began a collaboration with choreographer Lizzi Kew Ross, producing work for cathedrals in Stations of the Resurrection and Stations of the Crossing, and the theatre with Where We Are and Here We Are.
In 2021 Dean began publishing video albums on chaplachap records; these have a relation to visual albums, but rather than containing a collection of music videos, are offered as a form of video & sound art. While referencing vinyl concept albums, they also recall a time when video artists conceptualised a future of dematerialised art, distributed outside of commodification systems. The technology to enable this eventually arrived, but along with it came both a shift in patterns of consumption and a convergence of media, such that ‘video art’ itself may no longer exist except as an art-historical phenomenon; yet here we are… recent releases include Seven Sacraments and Künstlerroman.
Video & sound is presented on this site to document art works exhibited elsewhere or published via chaplachap records. Further exhibition or publication is not permitted without express permission from the artist, or other rights holders. Appropriated source material is acknowledged in accordance with Copyright and Rights in Performances (Quotation and Parody) Regulations; all other material Mark Dean.