Tacita Dean: Film Works

Miami Art Central, (January 20 – April 15, 2007)

A leading artist of her generation, Tacita Dean (b.1965) has worked in a variety of media, including drawing and printmaking, but, most notably, film and sound. This exhibition presents a selection of some of Dean’s most compelling 16mm film works, dating from the 1990s to the present. Ideas of loss and disappearance play important roles in these films, which revolve around forgotten stories, coincidences, singular events, and failed utopian projects. Dean’s films blur fact and fiction, perception and reality. Above all, they present a meditation on the cinematic experience itself, from the traditional structures of narrative cinema to the specific nature and mechanics of filmmaking.

COINCIDENCES HAVE ALWAYS INTERESTED DEAN

Her long preoccupation with random associations and unpredictable outcomes has been fundamental to her artistic method. She allows the element of chance to become part of the process of her research, writing, filming, and editing. Chance is the thread that flows through the artist’s films and permits the unexpected to occur.

Since her 1996 work Disappearance at Sea, Dean’s films have comprised long takes, static camera positions, and optical soundtracks created independently of the images. With this film, she stopped using the voiceover narration of her previous work, and most of her subsequent projects unfold around an event accompanied only by ambient sound. Dean’s films appear to take place in real time. Their slow pace and the attention to each passing instant that they allow induces an intense sense of the present moment in the viewer. This can be bewildering and disorienting. On the other hand, this stillness enables him or her to experience a new perception of time, one that is framed by his or her own subjectivity. In order to make sense, the films require the viewer to surrender to their tempo, “to experience them from beginning to end.”

Dean has also produced extensive written narratives about her films. These exist—and are meant to be read—separately from the films. The narratives are not inferred from the images; they do not describe the films, but offer an adjacent story, which exists as an independent entity, side by side with the film. Around Disappearance at Sea, for example, the artist creates parallel narratives, which occur outside the frame of the film. The film, texts, and some additional works—Disappearance at Sea II (1997), Teignmount Electron (1998), and Bubble House, (1999)—relate to the tragic fate of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur sailor who attempted to fake a solo voyage around the world and eventually lost his sanity and life to the sea. What we see in the film, however, is the hypnotic rotation of the lenses of a lighthouse and a view out to sea at nightfall, filmed in anamorphic widescreen in a single continuous take.

Dean intends most of her films to be projected in the 16 mm format. When exhibiting her work, she deliberately places the projector and screen within the same physical space.  The movement, sound, and specific character of the projector—a nearly anachronistic machine that stands almost as a separate sculptural object—remind the viewer that the image he or she sees is an illusion, a construct. Dean’s installations constitute a poetic tribute to the autonomy of film and the paradoxical nature of projection.

Tacita Dean in Roland Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean, ed. Mela Davila and Roland Groenenboom (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and Actar, 2000), p. 80.

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The exhibition Tacita Dean: Film Works was curated by Rina Carvajal, Miami Art Central Executive Director and Chief Curator.  This presentation was sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.  Additional support was provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, and the Cowles Charitable Trust.