Stephen Dean

ROPE & VORTEX

Installation view at the FRAC Corsica, Citadelle de Corte, 2019

ROPE - 11 min.

VORTEX - 6 min.

“Rope tilts towards the more narrative, if not in a straightforward manner. It streams a number of non-linear, associative episodes compiled from 10 years of footage that includes striking sequences shot at the theatre Marie Antoinette built at Versailles, the Villa Medici in Rome, the École de Cirque in Bordeaux and in the streets of Belém, Brazil. Connected by the imagery of rope, of pulley systems and similar networks of greater or lesser elaboration, the film begins with the raising of the curtain at the Petit Théâtre de la Reine. That, however, only reveals another curtain behind it, as if the illusions that comprise art are not so easily penetrated. About connections, physical and abstract, we see, additionally, the hoisting of a life-sized royal statue by rope as it is moved from one location to another as well as a silhouetted acrobat who evokes, among other possibilities, a hanged figure.” Lily Wei - Studio International

9 min. single channel video

4000 sq.ft. flag

Image: Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte

Sound: Vincent Tarrière, Vince Theard

Editing: Stephen Dean

Gloria Films production

Capacete Entertainment

VOLTA turns away from the soccer game to show only its raucous spectators. A composite of nearly a dozen Brazilian championship matches, it captures rhythms of disappointment and euphoria at a massive scale. Smoke bombs explode, banners roll across thousands of spectators, chants erupt: out of this chaos people are revealed as pixels of skin color forming a fanatic choreography.

At once a document of mass behavior and a painting in motion VOLTA tangles cognition and imagination, compressing time, color and the brutality of rituals into a strange, dense substance. The camera dives into theses massive performances to extract rhythms and patterns of trance, turning them into hypnotic and permanent traces. Suspended between an abstract vision and close observation of bodies, of writhing organisms, one passes beyond figuration and disappears, into the multitude.

8 min. single channel video

Image: Emmanuel Broche, Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, Stanislas Henry, Margaux Louveau

Sound: John Tipton

Editing: Stephen Dean

Gloria Films productions

Centre National du Cinema

Alpesh Kantilal Patel, in Productive failure published by Manchester University Press

“Color is particularly relevant when discussing Stephen Dean’s PULSE , a 7min 30 sec single channel video installation that captures the metaphysical “pulse” of Holi - the Indian festival that marks the arrival of spring through the throwing of colorful pigment and water in the air and onto bodies themselves. Dean went to an area known for its overzealous engagement with the Holi tradition in Uttar Pradesh, a state in the north of India. He projected his team’s footage of the pigment-saturated air onto the walls of an enclosed space, immersing the viewer a whirl of large washes of color ( magenta, cyan, yellow, orange and green ). His video cuts in quick succession from one close shot of saturated color to another of dizzying, hypnotic, psychedelic manner and includes alternative passages of frenetic sound and silence, stimulating the heightened emotion and sensuousness of the Holi festival. Bodies are certainly visible but they often cannot be separated from the world around them; the former and latter are intertwined. In fact, Dean’s video becomes so abstract that it often seems painterly, with the installation a veritable temporo-spatial version of a Color Field painting.”

Alpesh Kantilal Patel, in Productive failure published by Manchester University Press

7 min. 30 sec. single channel video

Image: Jonathan Allen, Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte

Editing: Stephen Dean

Sound: Oscar Louveau, Vince Theard

Rockaway productions

Stephen Dean’s Grand Prix, a video of garishly painted cars hunkered together at a dirt starting line, engines throbbing. Then come the close-ups of spinning wheels, as the automobiles tear off and crash into each other, grinding and huffing like bellowing bulls. During the carnage, one station wagon slams another against a wall, then backs out of the frame and plows into it again, then again, jagged shards of metal blossoming from both. Quarter panels and doors, festooned in swirling graffiti and checker-board war paint , are soon rent and flopping like flayed skin; shattered vehicles lurch through clouds of steam and flames. This Pollock’s unconscious, Bacon’s accident and Bosch’s Hell mashed up in a kinetic action painting of the profligate waste and blind, slashing rage of Bush’s America.

R.C.Baker Best in Show The Village Voice

6 min. single channel projection

Image: Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte

Sound: Vincent Tarrière, Vince Theard

Editing: Stephen Dean

Gloria Films production, Rockaway production

5 min. single channel video

Image: Stephen Dean, Vince Royer

Sound: Vince Theard

Editing: Stephen Dean

Rockaway production

20 min. / 5 channels video

Image: Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, Vincent Royer

Sound: Vince Theard

Rockaway production, Tokyo Wonder Site

In the course of a research and exhibition residency at Tokyo Wonder Site Institute of Contemporary Art, Dean's discovery of the thermal camera led him to merge the ready-made and the already-made in individual works, notably his footage of the San Fermin bull run in Pamplona and the videos making up the series Fever. In this instanceit is the camera that makes artistic material out of images of crowd movements caused by the bulls, with virtually no intervention by the artist except the showing of the results. The material is no longer actually edited, but simply cut up, with no attempt to reshape a narrative in any form. The image is immediately rendered abstract because the people and animals in it appear as concentric halos whose colors bear no relation to what is seen by the human eye. These subjects are simply translated, at the expense of their settings which, being cold, are not registered by the camera—not, at least, if the camera has been set to respond to the nuances of living heat sources. At this point the issue of mise en scène becomes crucial. The screens can be structural elements that can be multiplied on a monumental scale in a single room and thus produce the kind of saturated exhibition layout seen in "Trampolines" at the Art and Media School in Caen, France.

At the same time as it allows amalgamation of readymade and already-made, combining direct documentary fidelity to the object with abstraction, the Fever series lines up with some of the new experiences recent years have offered the citizens of the globalized world under circumstance whose consequences vary according to the individual status of those involved. With the rise in anxiety about influenza pandemics—bird flu, swine flu, and others still to come—thermal cameras have made their appearance in certain airports, or rather at certain border posts, enabling detection of the presence of fever in the bodies of tourists and migrants and thus denial of entry to those presumed to be ill. In the age of globalization these cameras are also instruments of war, repression and surveillance, doubtless because they are first and foremost tools for "pushing back spatialborders" and increasing knowledge by "making the invisible visible"; the same tools that allow Stephen Dean to make art—and even abstract art.

Eric de Chassey I Mutani Villa Medici, Rome

7 min. single channel projection

Image: Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte

Sound: Vincent Tarrière, Vince Theard

Editing: Stephen Dean

Gloria films productions, Rockaway productions

Half dream, half nightmare, Las Vegas captures a distinctively American mix of gumption and excess. Stephen Dean’s No More Bets draws us into the city’s luminous signs, screens, and surfaces, abstracting its visual excess to reveal beautiful, unexpected patterns of color and light - Tetris walls, distorted mirrors, and repetitious gambling-addict - within the city’s semiotic jumble, bringing us toward a level of abstraction usually occluded by the visual excess of Vegas. During a single moment of darkness mid-film, 4,000 watts of red light will flash in the dark gallery, engulfing the viewer within the image.

Henry Urbach, Double Down, Two visions of Vegas - SFMOMA

2 min. single channel video

Image / editing: Stephen Dean

Documentation: Vincent Royer

Rockaway production, Grande Image Lab