Victoria J Dean’s practice explores the human propensity to rationalise space, in the context of place and landscape.
Technology is restructuring our communication methods, transforming our perceptions and interactions with our environment, and rendering the physical realm comparatively cumbersome and slow. Disconnected from the modern digital world, these material structures and the systems in which they once functioned are obsolete. With the simplicity and directness of a symbolic form, each structure withholds its message, alluding to a relic from a forgotten language.
The Illusion of Purpose explores ideas of materiality, monumentality and the sculptural, questioning the relevance of the physical in our increasingly virtual age, and in a world of communication hijacked by technology.
About Victoria J Dean
Victoria J Dean is a photographic artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has exhibited and been published internationally including at Off_festival Bratislava, Slovakia, 2018; as a winner in the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards, Klompching Gallery, New York; and in There and Not There at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2018, and Siamsa Tire in Tralee, in 2019. She was a finalist in Klompching Gallery’s FRESH 2017, and has frequently exhibited in the Royal Ulster Academy and RHA annual exhibitions, also exhibiting in the 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Her work featured in Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography at Belfast Exposed & The Mac in 2013, and in Circulation(s): Festival de la Jeune Photographie Européenne, 2014 in Paris.
Graduating in 2017 with an MFA Photography with distinction (Ulster University), Dean received the Royal Ulster Academy Award for Outstanding Students. She was selected by Olivia Arthur (Magnum) and Anna Sparham (Curator, Museum of London) in Source Magazine’s Graduate Photography Online 2017 Selections. Dean’s book, The Illusion of Purpose was published by Another Place Press in 2018, and the series featured in Source, Issue 95.
Victoria J Dean’s work is part of the David Kronn Collection, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection, the Office of Public Works State Art Collection, and a number of private collections in the UK and Ireland. Dean is a studio holder at Flax Art Studios and is represented by the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. [Official Website]
