Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Michael Dean:Analogue
LOL
Curated by Victor Wang
ShanghART
Gallery, Shanghai
24 March – 13 May 2018
The exhibition, which is imbued with the characteristics and concrete syntax of public spaces, delves into the recent proliferation and prominence of pictorial language and the gradual erosion of text-based communication through digital devices. It explores how the ambiguity of these forms of communication has enabled them to assume a range of culturally specific meanings and spaces beyond their intended use. Titled "Analogue LOL", the exhibition is the result of a collaborative effort between curator Victor Wang and artist Michael Dean, and centers on the construction of common spaces and the evolution of language, specifically through the acronym "LOL" (laughing out loud) and its recent development into the emoji officially known as "Face with Tears of Joy". Occupying a space somewhere between picture and word, in 2015 this emoticon became the first pictograph to be named "word of the year" by Oxford Dictionaries, signaling a shift in the application, use, and reception of language towards a "post-text" form of communication.
The exhibition explores the parallel shifts in image communication and the public sphere. The materials used by Dean to sculpt and support the acronym LOL – a unique blend of communication constructed by recomposing words into a type of sculpted articulation – also references the historical significance of steel and concrete for construction and the development of public spaces. These materials were born in a specific era and from distinct modernizing ideas of accessibility and shared dialogue. Dean then brings these fundamental developments in the urban and social landscape onto the rapid advancement of technological communication. The characteristics and materials of construction are incorporated into an interweaving of the analogue and the digital, a repositioning of social life and public communication that allows chat rooms to become public domain, plazas to become dance floors, letters to become symbols, and images to become words, through the expanded use of modified logograms, emoticons, and emojis.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Dean’s work is often described as sculpture, but it is not sculpture in a traditional sense. The artist explores the dynamics of inner-city living and the various emotional states that arise from the harsh and rugged concrete surfaces that are a defining feature of such environments.
Each of Dean's artworks and exhibitions, including the current one, is rooted in the utilization of words and letters as the primary medium. However, these words and emotions are transformed and distorted through the artist's manipulation and rearrangement, much like how the posture of a minimum-wage employee is shaped and contorted by the unbridled forces of the city. In several works we see the tensions of family dynamics played out in the configuration and demeanour of Dean’s acronym-based sculptures. Who can laugh? Who is laughing at whom? What's so funny? Transformed from ink and lead, these charged emotions are cast and moulded from the same construction materials that were used to redevelop Shanghai’s West Bund, and that connect the joints of the city, and its public spaces to its hosts. With a genuinely personal touch, these related units of work include bike locks, stickers, security tape and cast hands and fingers of Dean’s own family, playing on notions of intention and reception. Just as Dean’s use of opaque imagery withholds and obscures meaning, so too do these fists, palms, and fingers, that can be read either as peace signs or as two-fingered salutes, depending on their direction.
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Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART
Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
The exhibition employs the use of torn pages and poured colored concrete as a means of creating a space that bridges the gap between language, social space and the pictorial transformation of both. It utilizes the architecture of "LOL" and the visual field of construction to bring together an unstructured collection of speech and laughter, which both invades and slows down the rapid abstraction of language and space. Image-based emotions in the twenty-first century provide the foundation for an international written and visual mode of expression that has inevitably complicated the divide between text-based communication and image language. The exhibition delves into the concept of the "post-emotion" and "post-text" as it pertains to the diffusion of communication technology. This concept has been developed through a series of discussions between the artist and the curator. The "post-emotion" refers to a cloud of emotional technologies that encapsulate the transformation of human expression occurring within both virtual and physical socio-technological networks. These networks include the mouth, phone, paper, and screen, all of which have been explored in the exhibition. Just as Dean examines the anatomical development of the city, its fundamental institutions, and optical instruments, the "post-emotion" and "post-text" tracks explore the evolution of language and expression within the dynamic economy of time and its growing scarcity. This progression is traced from speech to text and acronym, from emoticons to Emojis and online likes and shares. The "post-emotion" delves into the structure of communication and language, while simultaneously highlighting its increasing ambiguity.
MICHAEL DEAN 迈克尔·迪恩, LOLLOLLOL (working title) 2018
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
MICHAEL DEAN 迈克尔·迪恩, Lols (working title), 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
MICHAEL DEAN 迈克尔·迪恩 LoL LoL (Working Title), 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART
Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART
Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Installation View, Analogue LOL, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. 2018.
Analogue
LOL
Curated by Victor Wang
24 March. – 13 May 2018
ShanghART Gallery, Westbund
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Michael Dean (b. 1977 Newcastle upon Tyne, now lives and works in London) starts his work with writing - which then abstracted into human-scale sculptures, using industrial and daily materials such as concrete, steel, padlocks, papers. Dean explores the three-dimensional possibilities of language by ‘spelling out’ his words through the alphabet of concrete sculptures, the contagion of stickers, dyed books, casts of his and his families’ fists and fingers. Dean’s practice is not about presenting readable words, but rather about a disclosure of the personal, striking something in equality between the author and the viewer while placing the people in front of the work. Dean will have a solo exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle, UK) in 2018 and a solo exhibition at the Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico) in 2019.
Recent exhibitions include: Skulptur Projekte, Münster (2017); More Than Just Words [On the Poetic], Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017); Turner Prize 2016, Tate Britain, London (2016); Sic Glyphs, South London Gallery, London (2016); Lost True Leaves, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Qualities of Violence, De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2015); Mirrorcity (curated by Stephanie Rosenthal), Hayward Gallery, London (2014); Thousand Doors (curated by Iwona Blazwick), Whitechapel at The Gennadius Library, Athens (2014); The Introduction of the Muscle, Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Government, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2012); Acts of Grass, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London (2011) ; A Dying Artist, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2011).
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VICTOR WANG
All content property of © Victor Wang 2009 - 2023 All rights reserved -- BEIJING - LONDON.
All content property of © Victor Wang 2009 - 2023 All rights reserved -- BEIJING - LONDON.