Danielle Dean

Kindly donated by the artist and 47 Canal, New York

About this work: 

For the past several years, Dean has researched in the Ford Motor Company archives, exploring the system of mass production pioneered by the American company in the early 20th century, along with the visual tropes and culture of the company’s advertising. Her research has surfaced Fordlândia, an industrial plantation that Henry Ford erected in the Brazilian rainforest that corralled workers into standardized schedules, hamburger and tinned peaches for meals, and architecture modeled on the farm towns of the American Midwest. Fordlândia was abandoned after worker revolts in the 1930s rendered the enterprise untenable and the entire settlement was deserted.Dean’s ongoing watercolor landscape series begins with the artist digitally collaging Ford advertisements without respect to their chronology and then stripping them of all traces of human habitation. With pristine cars and models removed and domesticated animals rendered wild, the artist reconfigures previouslyDisney-fied landscapes as eerily sparse, post-apocalyptic spaces, with the implication that humans have eradicated themselves.

About the artist: 

Danielle Dean (b. 1982 in Alabama) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising, and from her multinational background—born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, and brought up in a suburb of London—her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance. 

Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She recently worked on a new commission for Performa 21, New York (2021); Amazon Proxy and a solo show at The Tate Britain, London (2022); Amazon. Other solo shows include Trigger Torque at The Ludwig, Germany (2019), True Red Ruin at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018), Bazar at 47 Canal in New York (2018), Landed at Cubitt gallery in London (2018) and Focus: Danielle Dean at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York) (2016). She is was included in The Whitney Biennale in New York (2022) Her work has also been included in group exhibitions Freedom of Movement, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Anti, Athens Biennale in Athens Greece, The Centre Cannot Hold, Lafayette Anticipation, (Paris) Artist’s film international, The Whitechapel Gallery, (London), From Concrete to liquid to spoken worlds to the word, Centre D’Art Contemporain Geneve (Geneva, Switzerland), In Practice: Material Deviance at Sculpture Center (New York), Experimental People at High Line Art (New York), Lagos Live at the Goethe Institut Nigeria (Lagos), and Made in L.A. 2014 at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) among many others.