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Selected Photographs and Installation, Artifice and Fragmentations SeriesPost an Event »

Togonon Gallery

April 1 - May 1, 2011

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77 Geary Street Second Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
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Selected Photographs and Installation, Artifice and Fragmentations Series berry with the camera, 72
Togonon Gallery is pleased to introduce the first solo show of Dean Dempsey at the gallery. Selected Works investigates spectrums of the unfamiliar, presenting multiple bodies of work that are informed by both biographical history and fictional re staging. Through his work, Dempsey is able to explore notions of belonging, whilst questioning the ways in which society constructs ideas of normality. Artifice is made up of fictional characters who stage scenes that question nuclear family, gender, and the body politic. The images employ theatricality, with the artist embodying a variety of characters as a form of storytelling. Through his positioning of individuals as other-bodied figures, Dempsey is able to comment on belonging and origin. Paraphernalia of the image making is often left in this series as evidence of the artist’s process. Dempsey explains: “In this series, I stage subhuman characters to create a narrative around the nuclear family and gender. Much of this body of work also reveals the paraphernalia of process and production, or the Artifice of my image-making.” Limbs and bodies as things that can be removed and replaced explore similar questions of the unfamiliar. Using personal experience and reconstructions of memory as a platform, Fragmentations also fastens itself someplace within the collective consciousness of being, both removed yet present at the same time.