In 2017, while listening to an exhibition talk with the artist, Evergon, April Dean had an epiphany: As an artist, you can just do the things you love.
Dean had been working in and around arts institutions for 10 years, first as a student, then as an arts administrator. In that time, art had acquired some baggage — as can happen when a love also becomes a labour — and she was struggling to connect to a subject. Looking at Evergon’s work — both the content and the form — Dean felt as if a lightbulb had come on. The idea that art could be fun again was nothing short of a revelation.
“You don’t have to overthink, and be crippled by the anxiety of, ‘Is this the right thing?’” she tells me in her living room on a warm Sunday morning. “You can just do things you love. And they can seem superficially silly, but they have deep meaning and that will resonate with other people.”
I’d come to visit Dean to talk about her new exhibition, In Violet Light, at the Art Gallery of St. Albert until July 6. The show pairs work Dean has been making over the last few years with soft-sculptural work by the artist Taiessa. Dean’s practice, which includes photography, printmaking, and stop-motion video, is grounded in our relationship to time. “I have always been interested in the idea of, or the philosophy of time.” For her, our experience of time is incongruent with how we measure it. “Time is so elastic. It can be so fast and so slow — and I hate this idea of regulated clock time.”
Appropriately, Dean’s work deprioritizes time as a system and instead explores how we experience it. She regularly employs short, at times haunting passages of text that use tense, temporal adverbs, and collective pronouns to summon the feeling of time, often through a sense of possibility or longing. “We are almost always never dreaming,” reads one passage, printed across a t-shirt in one of Dean’s Wet T-Shirt prints. By stacking adverbs, Dean creates two extremes — always and never — and asks a viewer to sit in the vastness between them with the question: Are we usually dreaming, or are we never dreaming enough?
In 2018, after her epiphany, Dean applied for a residency at the Banff Centre with the conscious goal of steering her practice toward subjects she cared about. The result was a pairing of photography, which Dean describes as her first true love and houseplants. In Banff she began to play, creating still lifes of plant clippings, using cameras and digital scanners. The resulting images walk the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary. For one series, Dean scanned plant clippings on a flatbed scanner with the top left open. A skylight, positioned above the scanner, shows up in the images as a stretch of blue amid an otherwise black background. The clippings, which hover at the centre of the image, feel holy, almost godly.
In the past, Dean’s work has had an intangible quality to it. Her use of language, her empty wet t-shirts — even her cyanotypes — suggest absence. With houseplants, Dean feels newly focused on what is there, rather than what isn’t. In both houseplants and photography, she seems to have found the perfect vessels for thinking about time, and about how we live.
Dean’s work often draws on the quotidian, infusing it with a sense of the sublime. Yet in conversation, she has a habit of referring to her work as boring — which she sees as a good thing (“What a privilege to be bored!”).
Sitting across from her, I wonder if boredom is another way for Dean to play with the feeling of time. “When I get into a studio situation… there is an absolute slowing of time.” In her work, that slowing feels like an invitation — like she is hoping viewers, through slowness, might have lightbulb moments of their own.
A few days after we speak, I text Dean with more questions. She’s hard at work on final images for In Violet Light, and she sends me a few. They are playful, considered. They mix plant life with various plastics — something Dean has been thinking a lot about lately. I’m zoomed in on a small pink blossom when another message arrives. This time it’s just text: “I’ve been shooting new still-life photos every night this week and I’m having so much fun.”
This article appears in the June 2024 issue of Edify
