Dean Dempsey

I use personal narratives to engage discourse concerning social issues of race, class, and origin; this discussion is situated in a larger dialogue of identity and how one’s orientation doesn’t always reflect public perception.  I composite myself multiple times in single images to reenact processes of feeling, memory, and notions belonging.  Some works also incorporate relatives, such as my grandmother, in which assumptions of familial exclusion are demonstrated by our general lack of resemblance.   For this body of work, my preferred medium is the light box, which to me suggests both the advertisement—a glimpse into a constructed plot that one is meant to identify with—and the motion picture, with some of the images seeming to suggest a film still from a larger story.  The advertisement and the cinematic still imply something incomplete, giving the viewer a partial history to contemplate what happens before and after that with which they are presented.