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Melissa Dean, artist's statement abstract.

In this body of works, I have been concerned with very different issues: culture, minimalism, beauty, aesthetics, history, modernity, process, conceptualism, sexuality, and the stigma of photography, to name a few. My work attempts to reconcile these issues, these contrasting languages that I have absorbed through both routine cultural saturation and academic exploration. In this body of work there are several issues that have come to the forefront: imagery (consuming and desiring), materials (choice and construction), and process (making and interactivity).

The imagery is always the human body, but alternately readable, obscured and obliterated. With this representation of the information, I intend to create a dialogue concerning presence and absence of imagery. I am interested in how abstraction and texture compete with imagery, and subsequently how the pieces interact singularly and together.

These works consist exclusively of transparent photographic enlarging film, and metal pins or wire. The use of photographic materials implicitly generates a critique of the short history of photography, and its stigma as a tool of truthful documentation. I dissect my photographs into many pieces, puncturing the fragments with pins or wire. The physicality and sculptural qualities of the pieces also show the photographic material not just as a window to an image, but as an object in itself: a construction.

The process is these works is two-fold: my own personal processes of manufacture, and the viewer's interaction that completes the process. My processes involve many steps of ritualized processes such as photographing, choosing, printing, dissecting, puncturing, reconstructing, and presenting. The fixation upon these processes intimately ties me to the work. Once the work is "finished," however, it is subject to a second set of process that is integral to the piece: the interaction of the viewer. This tendency to reconstruct, to identify and understand makes the viewer more aware of the physical construction of the work, as well as their own primary interaction.

 

 

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