Danielle Dean, Resident Artist Lecture 2024

Danielle Dean gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about her practice which includes–but is not limited to–video, performance, writing, watercolour and gouache drawings, animation, sculpture, and installation. Dean begins her lecture by posing the following questions: What happens if one can not disentangle what is real or not? What gets passed through family or media? Does ones subjectivities get affected or even constructed in relation to capitalism? How do our behaviours, languages, and relationships get interpolated by things like advertising and soap operas? How does one become a consumer and how can one integrate products into one’s emotional life in relation to normative gender roles? One way in which Dean approaches these questions is through performance, specifically by reenacting and reinterpreting archives of advertising as well as confronting the material history of advertising. Dean begins by creating assemblages by combing through the scripts of political speeches; often thinking about where the speeches came from which informs how the narrative or context is created, where the performance happens, and where the video is shot. Dean also looks at layers of appropriation and how corporate brands appropriate from political rhetoric. Dean then speaks about her ongoing interest in the reality of a film and how it not only has an effect on all of us but also becomes a material that is present with us and formulates real consequences. Dean continues on in her lecture by reflecting on how even though language is something that lays itself over objects and defines us, language can also be approached as something being meshed up and entangled together. Dean ends her lecture by stating how she is continuously curious about the exciting potential of how history can be accessed through materials: especially materials that exist in archives.