The Toxic Form Project by Dean Arlen

OPENING RECEPTION - THE TOXIC FORM PROJECT BY DEAN ARLEN

Date: Thursday 5th July, 2018
Time: 7pm - 9pm
Address: 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain
Contact: 680-1041, 622-1196 or [email protected]

Gallery Hours:
Mon-Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 11am - 2pm

ARTIST’S TALK
Date: Thursday 19th July 2018, 7pm - 9pm

PANEL DISCUSSION - “Masculinity Conversation” 
Featuring:
Amilcar Sanatan - coordinator, UWI Socialist Conference
Dr. Ty Salandy - Sociologist
Dean Arlen - Installation Artist
Date: Thursday 26th July 2018, 7pm - 9pm

Exhibition continues until: Saturday 4th August, 2018
Please contact the gallery for more information or to make an appointment to preview the exhibition

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Dean Arlen’s multi-disciplinary education has shaped his innovative approach to art-making and design. At John Donaldson Technical Institute, he completed a Craftsman Diploma in Jewellery making and at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus he pursued Visual Arts. He proceeded to the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada, on a Commonwealth Fellowship. There he pursued studies in installation art, which included foundry, plastics, wood making, welding and moulding. Collectively these experiences contributed to his passion for installation art and transforming public and private spaces.

ABOUT THE SHOW – ARTIST’S STATEMENT 

“I’m a multi-disciplinary artist exploring my Urban + Human + Environment; touching the everydayness; influenced by a material and textural didacticism; exploring, developing an aesthetic language, from an experiential, reflexive response to living within an indigenous urban - which contains within its structuralism an active political, economic, social space; which has historically been seduced by a capitalist, modernist paradigm, now, a neo-liberal economic narrative. From ah* Rapso to Hip-Hop, from ah Bagatell community to ah Trenchtown Jamaican communal dance-hall style to ah IMF imperialist culture, engulfing small island states, infecting and affecting the human state of being’s actions, creating neo-movements; hyper-actions reflexed through bodily gestures – deriving from a psychological, which manifest into this magnificent physicality, evolving into a syncretic cultural phenomenon. Appropriated and stock photos of people in particular states of actions is manipulated, by first blowing them up, then deconstructing and reconstructing the image, reanimating it to another socio-political action, each action is layered with paper, then another action image, repeating image over image is glued, later to be sanded-down, searching for imagery creating, this act creates that textural didacticism, finally creating that neo-action statement, the art. The politics of the body set the foundation for a serious discourse towards self-realization, and liberation for the human; as we will say in this island republic, “Dey Wuking It”, we “Toi-Toi” as they do in South Africa. Neo-movements are made in our celebrations, in our pain, towards liberation.”

Dean Arlen 2017