About
Mark Dean began looping appropriated film while studying photography and painting in the late 1970’s, 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 with works exhibited widely and held in international museum collections.
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. This treatment of music as primary material is paralleled by a consistent use of film as objet trouvé; 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 on a theology of kenosis, or self-emptying; a practice grounded in the lived experience of trauma.
Working via the gallery system in the 1990’s and 2000’s, Dean was ordained in 2010, and following this has produced cross-disciplinary and collaborative events. In 2021 Dean began publishing video albums on chaplachap records; while referencing vinyl LPs and EPs, they also recall a time when video artists conceptualised a future of dematerialised art, distributed outside of commodification systems. The technology to realise this eventually arrived, but along with it came both a shift in patterns of consumption and a convergence of media, such that ‘video art’ may no longer exist beyond its own history; and yet here we are…
Video and 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. Documentation of previously editioned work is watermarked. Appropriated source material is acknowledged in accordance with copyright legislation; all other material is © Mark Dean
