"The Spiral Jetty felt mythical. The possibility that it might have an actual existing physical form seemed implausible. When I went looking for it, it was hard to find and kept its mystery close: an old-fashioned odyssey."
Tacita Dean, born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK, studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000. She is esteemed for her drawings, photographs, prints, and sound works, as well as her artists' books and texts. She is best known, however, for her films, which she began exhibiting in galleries in the mid-1990s, making her one of the first artists of her generation to dedicate herself to the medium. She is fascinated by the dynamics between the materiality of celluloid and the passage of time, which she employs in the service of narrative, however apparent or oblique, and regardless of her subjects, which include artists, anachronistic architecture, and landscape. Characterized by static camera positions, long takes and ambient sound, her films are imbued by an uncanny stillness that elicits meditative forms of attention. Dean's acute regards for light and subtle forms of motion combine to create singular evocations of sensibility and place, the spirit of the moment, and the essence of film itself. In early 2013, Dean's new film, JG, was on view at the Arcadia University Art Gallery. The film was commissioned by the gallery and funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
