Judith Dean at South Parade

Judith Dean’s paintings question the way in which we look at images and art. Using her non-writing hand to overcome the control exerted by the conscious mind, Dean makes paintings that explore perspective and the singularity of the mind’s eye in framing and authorship. Using the contingency of found pictures on the internet, the compositions are framed as receding stages or galleries. We see walls, floors, ceilings and separated rooms emerge from blind alleys, dead ends and shifting horizons. The digital world is a multiverse of images in which our attention is manipulated to focus on what is narrow and commercially and politically expedient. By painting numerous images within one painting, Dean distracts or prevents us from focussing on one subject – making us aware of both the mind’s natural control and society’s. The original images come from a variety of cultural, geographical and historical sources and the painting process assembles these disparate images into a world of staged inevitability.