Brandon Dean
Temple University, Tyler School of Art
Natives
Oil and spray paint on wood
60" x 23.5" (2)
My work merges various styles from painting's extensive history and pairs them with white male models sourced from modern fashion advertising. As someone different from the race from the figures I depict, I became aware of painting as being more than a material consideration. Painting is an institutional construct, a conceptual framework in whose nascent form is the history of images themselves. I summon the narratives of various languages of painting with tropes from graphic design, advertising, and general image culture to create in essence a new sort of ad, selling a conflated series of signals and messages. How these related worlds address the figure became of specific interest. These figures are used in media to sell not only the product they are hired to advertise, but aspects of themselves incapable of being purchased (something that finds parallel in painting). The idea of these men (both in advertising and in painting) as salesmen, not only of what items they are used to sell, but of their own identities is something that runs deep through all of my work. In essence, the way painting as a form of image-making functions institutionally, conceptually, and historically are what most concern me and bring me to this honored medium.