They Early Doors

Michael Dean presents They Early Doors, a solo show in São Paulo exhibited across Mendes Wood DM and Casa Iramaia.

Can the experience of a scene be described as an account of syntax? For artist Michael Dean, the possibilities within such a question drive his ongoing investigation on the transmutation of language – a task he undertakes through overlapping practices of sculpture, writing, and typography. Often employing three-dimensional structures to publish his ideas, Dean exercises a need to set words onto symbols, activating each space to relentlessly create new experiences. For the occasion of They Early Doors, the artist returns to enduring reflections on nature and the posthuman condition, presenting a new body of work in the form of self-fired and hand-molded concrete sculptures.

The starting point for They Early Doors was an unassuming photograph of a familiar football pitch captured by the artist on an early spring morning. A banal scene shot at a local park in England, it depicts a netless goalpost on an apparently deserted green field. Present at the scene, a few resting birds serve as the only other living observers. Staging this photograph, or this experience, pushed Dean to identify the syntax of the elements present: Three singular goalposts, the potential of the moment punctuated by the birds or the glimpse of human presence on the fresh-trimmed grass.

Using this model of putting text into an environment, the artist sets the words that resonate with the vocabulary present at sight. Transcribing feelings into concrete sculptures, Dean makes powerful use of ceramics technique, treating concrete, instead of clay, to fire, manipulating the material entirely by hand. Through press molds and hand forms, he creates concrete shapes that bear witness to the surroundings captured on camera. Translating the physicality of the goalposts into textured concrete ware or clocking the images of birds as currency symbols. Placing emphasis on the ceramics-based nature of his work, Dean molds the hand-thrown concrete, self-firing it with a cast glaze and often holding evidence from nature. Working with concrete is a choice that the artist describes as democratic, a marker of a fluid language to be modified according to need.

For Roland Barthes,1 this evolving nature of meaning constitutes the essential difference between a work that is to be interpreted and a work to be experienced. For Dean, this is a constant that has always driven him to challenge the notions of authorship within an exhibition. Inviting viewers to become the protagonists as much as the artist behind the work, a process of manifestation by way of writing himself out of the experience. Not focused on trying to discern, They Early Doors invites viewers to embrace the unexpected, contributing to the inscription of new meanings.

[1] Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, 1971