BIO

Chelsea Dean (b. 1978, Phoenix) earned her BA in Studio Art from the University of Puget Sound and MFA in Drawing from Claremont Graduate University. Since 2005 she has worked and lived in Los Angeles.

Dean has exhibited widely in Los Angeles including solo and two person exhibitions at Keystone Gallery, PØST, Merchant Gallery, and R&R Gallery. Group exhibitions include High Desert Test Sites, Brand Library & Art Center, The Main Museum, Carl Berg Gallery, RAID Projects, Fellows of Contemporary Art, PØST, Monte Vista Projects, Cirrus Gallery, Durden and Ray, MiM and Armory in Southern California and internationally at Gallery Lara Tokyo in Tokyo. Curatorial projects include exhibitions featuring the work of Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Cindy Rehm, Aili Schmeltz, Devon Tsuno, Anita Bunn, and Bettina Hubby.

​Dean’s studio practice includes printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpture, and collage techniques, exploring architecture, home life, personal artifacts, and the decay of domestic ideals. Her process involves thoughtful exploration, documentation, gathering, and reimagining of both urban and rural landscapes. Recent work in assemblage, sculpture, and installation is inspired by her field studies and found objects from abandoned homesteads in Wonder Valley. This sparsely populated region of Southern California’s High Desert experienced a building boom brought on by the United States Small Tract Act in the late 30s. But by the early 60s thousands of homesteaders abandoned the cabins and other structures that they had built. With layering of elements and information she has observed and gathered, Dean’s recent work imagines the entropy of what was once full of promise sliding into inevitable decay.

STATEMENT

​My current body of work explores systems that erode and the conflict between order and entropy. Inspiration is found where I live and work in Southern California: both in Los Angeles and Wonder Valley. Iconic Mid Century architecture and design, shelters built by optimistic homesteaders now abandoned, evidence of domesticity, discarded personal artifacts, and the arid landscape, which is both brutal and sublime—my exploration, documentation, and imagining of these elements are incorporated into the work. Combining photographs, experimental printmaking, drawing, collage techniques, and installation, I assign new meaning. The work reveals both beauty and decay, dimensionally layering information spatially, revealing elements of the original object or ideal, as well as imagination of its inevitable destruction.