Tacita Dean

Saturday, 20 November 2010 19:05
Saturday, 5 February 2011 20:05

21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, G3 6DF (map)

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Tacita Dean, ‘Prisoner Pair’ (film still) (2008). Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Tacita Dean’s exhibition at The Common Guild presents a selection of works that can be seen as still lives. By using imagery of various natural forms, including trees and neolithic stones or ‘dolmens’ Dean focuses on the gradual processes of growth, transformation and demise.

Tacita Dean, installation view, The Common Guild (2010). Photo: Kendall Koppe.

Though primarily known for her 16mm film installations, Dean’s work ranges considerably in both subject and medium, withdrawing a significant and enduring component. Central to all of the works in the exhibition, and her practice in general, is an acute awareness of time and the weight of history that accompanies it. Using the still life as a means of observing temporality, Dean’s work often acts as a memento mori, reminding us of our own mortality, and the endurance of nature.

Dean often removes objects from their conventional context by blacking or whitening out extraneous information. Her films encourage extended examination through close-up footage or the illusion of real-time documentation. She invites us to linger in the scenes with which she presents us, often drawing us to the archaic or the near obsolete. Using editing to control the viewer’s perception of the subject, Dean occupies an area between sensual experience and forensic dissection, demonstrating her ongoing interest in the relationship between reality and fiction, and the subjective nature of history.

This exhibition of displaced objects explored space and time in a visual language that is almost sculptural. As curator Massimiliano Gioni has written; “I’ve always thought of Tacita Dean as being the Richard Serra of vision: her images are as dense and heavy as gigantic sculptures.”