Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Although typically sold today as a novelty item for flower arrangements and interior decorating flourishes, cotton can also be seen as a proxy, through synecdoche, for US slavery. Dead Zone (4) by Aria Dean presents a preserved blossom of that trade’s primary cash crop, cotton, crystalized in a state of non-decay whilst encased under protective glass. Hidden in the base of the work is a signal jammer which prevents mobile phones from broadcasting when nearby.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) , Danielle Dean uses archival documents to re-imagine colonial history from the 1400s, while also referencing her own personal history. Elmina Castle was built in Ghana in 1482 as a Portuguese trading post, and later became a key location in the Atlantic slave trade. Dean’s re-enactment is set in an affordable housing community in Houston, Texas, where her half-sister Ashstress Agwunobi lives, and who also performs the role of “the native.” Dean plays the role of “the prospector,” who plans to “colonize” her sister’s home by bringing a wobbly red cardboard castle into the grounds of the community and getting the locals to help build it and work there.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers. Danielle Dean’s work True Red examines how a large corporation co-opted a historical fiction (the vampire), in addition to the traditional red and black colors of radical politics and the avant-garde. The animated video considers how capitalism can gentrify notions of radicality and the mutable nature of advertising.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hexafluorosilicic acid is a type of sodium fluoride waste product that can be found in a large amount of widely available products such as cleaning fluids, toothpaste, rat poison, and drinking water. In Danielle Dean’s video Hexafluorosilicic , she mulls on this substance and its troubling co-option by modern society. In an indistinct US city, in an empty apartment, three characters (one of whom, unusually for Dean, is a white male) all wear brightly colored medical scrubs and undertake seemingly trivial and nonsensical experiments.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The sculpture shores shored (Working Title) makes reference to the human form. The two sides of the sculpture are distinctively different, with the rear showing an anamorphic-corrugated structure, the front suggesting the human form, making perhaps an unconscious reference to Giacometti or Barnett Newman. But whereas their work suggests immanence, Michael Dean refuses any notion of transcendence, remaining rooted in presentness .