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Tacita Dean




Tacita Dean (b. 1965 ) is an English Visual Art ist.


INTRODUCTION

Tacita Dean is best well known for her film works, although she utilises a variety of media including drawing, photography and sound. She has produced numerous 16mm films, often employing long takes and steady camera angles to create a melancholy atmosphere. Her anamorphic films are shot by cinematographers John Adderley and Jamie Cairney . She has also published several volumes of her own writings, whose themes complement her visual work. Her more recent films do not include commentary, but several of her texts form companion pieces to the films.

The sea forms a theme through Dean's work, particularly the other world of the open ocean, beyond the safety of the shore. Lighthouses are invoked as the boundary of this perilous realm. Many of her works are inspired by tales of marine misadventure, such as the tragic voyage of , recording false positions until he jumped overboard in despair. The artist tracked down his ruined boat on Cayman Brac in the Caribbean . Such relics are another common motif in Dean's work. In documenting these relics the artist also documents disappointments.


BIOGRAPHY

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury , England . She was educated at Kent College (private boarding school) Canterbury. Her brother is Ptolomy Dean, the architect. She studied at Falmouth School Of Art , graduating in 1988 . She studied in Athens for a year on a Greek government scholarship, before gaining a postgraduate degree from The Slade School Of Fine Art , University College London , in 1992 . The following year she won the 'Barclay's Young Artists' prize and exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery

Dean held her first solo exhibition ''The Martyrdom of St Agatha and Other Stories'', at Galerija Skuc, Maribor , Slovenia . Since then she has had several solo exhibitions, including:

Tacita Dean was nominated for (but failed to win) the 1998 Turner Prize (see Controversy). She has undertaken commissions for London's defunct Millennium Dome , the Sadler's Wells Theatre , and for Cork , Ireland , as part of that city's European City Of Culture celebrations. She has also completed residencies at the Sundance Institute , the Wexner Center For The Arts , Columbus , USA , and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst , Berlin


CONTROVERSY


Tacita Dean has been accused of producing very similar works to earlier pieces by other artists. For instance, in a letter to Art Monthly (October 1998) curator and art historian Anda Rottenberg noted similarities between Katarzyna Kozyra 's film "Bath House" and Dean's later work "Gellert" (named after the Gellért Baths ) - both works depict women chatting in a bath house in Budapest . Similarly "Blackout" (1997) by artist group Disinformation and Tacita Dean's "Sound Mirrors" (1999) both feature monlithic concrete Sound Mirrors found at various locations on the UK coast (and the correct chronology of these projects is documented in the essay "Listening for the Enemy" by Brian Dillon in Cabinet Magazine 12 pp. 68-71 New York 2003).


FILM WORKS

  • The Story of Beard, 1992

  • The Martyrdom of St Agatha (in several parts), 1994

  • Girl Stowaway, 1994

  • How to Put a Boat in a Bottle, 1995

  • A Bag of Air, 1995

  • Disappearance at Sea, 1996

  • Delft Hydraulics, 1996

  • Foley Artist, 1996

  • Disappearance at Sea II, 1997

  • The Structure of Ice, 1997

  • Gellért, 1998

  • Bubble House, 1999

  • Sound Mirrors, 1999

  • From Columbus, Ohio, to the Partially Buried Woodshed, 1999

  • Banewl, 1999

  • Teignmouth Electron, 2000

  • Totality, 2000

  • Fernsehrturm, 2001

  • Kodak, 2006



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