Brandon Dean
Invert, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 60x48 inches
Onward, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 20x16 inches
Aritst Statement
I strive to shed light on one's internal world view as it relates to figurative imagery. Specifically, how one's world view is affected when work reverses the usual subject/object relationship. Western painting history for centuries canonized a particular perspective from which otherness was defined, and by extension the world categorized. These paintings work to problematize what is comfortable about the assumptive nature of those categorizations, especially as they relate to the politics of the figure.
The figures are almost exclusively white, and come from either the fashion industry or from life. The former interests me in that their primary function is as implicit salesmen, often selling things that are intangible and incapable of being purchased. The latter is in effect taking a model that represents some culturally ingrained ideal, and turning them into that sort of salesmen. Their race activates a sort of problematized dual read; the dialog the painting creates at first blush, and then the changed dialog informed with the biography of the creator. It is that shift in meaning, in connotations and the fact that there is a shift at all, that is the central drive of this body of work.