Volume 3, No. 41 October 24, 2003
Environment caught in professor’s ‘Sieve’ A Review By Hannah Pittard “Sieve,” an exhibition featuring work by foundation studies professor Henry Dean, combines abstract paintings and drawings with digital images and installation components. Dean’s work has been said to embrace painterly methodologies and media with an emphasis on time, light, space and matter. “‘Sieve’ is a show of artwork that is directly and indirectly influenced by my interactions with the environment and my involvement with ‘landscape’ as a theme of painting,” said Dean. “One of the inspirations for the title was that the wetlands of the Low Country — that seems to be my stomping ground — are in their own ways a sieve for all the material flowing out of the river/inland.” A glance at Dean’s list of teaching residencies and commissions confirms his longstanding fascination with and incorporation of the environment and nature into his art. In 2002 he was the guest speaker for “Wetlands Celebration” at Oatland Island Education Center. In 1999, his installation, “The Memory of Water,” now on permanent display at The Noyes Museum of Art, featured an Atlantic white cedar log carved with collaborative assistance from the local community. Earlier that year he held a month-long residency funded by the New Jersey School Counselor Association and The Perkins Center for the Arts to co-direct 81 sixth graders at Bret Harte Elementary School in Cherry Hill, N.J., and the production of a collaborative, site-specific, outdoor, mixed-media sculpture installation inspired by the environment. In 1998 Dean acted as project initiator and head curator at The Philadelphia Art Alliance for “Through the Heart of the City,” for which he designed in-house public events programs including “Confluence: An Art/Science Colloquium,” co-hosted by The Academy of Natural Sciences. The list of Dean’s achievements and activities in which the environment plays a predominant role is a long one, as is the list of his nature-inspired exhibitions and installations. Dean’s latest exhibition proves equally aware of and loyal to Dean’s reputation as an environment-savvy artist. “‘Sieve’ expresses a holistic, nonlinear vision of the environment, supporting the notion that landscape is a complex entity constituting formative processes,” said Dean, who received his M.A. in fine arts and geography from St. Andrew’s University in Fife, Scotland, and an M.F.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. “Sieve” is on display at Bergen Hall Gallery, 101 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., through Nov. 17. A reception will be held Nov. 7, 5-8 p.m.
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