Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery

The Department of Art & Art History is pleased to present Account on view from July 14 to August 16, 2009, with an opening reception on July 16, from 5-7 PM at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery.

Account features the work of Ben Dean, an interdisciplinary artist working in video, film, installation and sculpture. This multimedia project is at once an inquiry into the economic history of the Bay Area and a meditation on the changing role of photography in light of new synthetic imaging technologies. In Account, a 16mm color film and black & white video play side-by-side in perfect synchrony. While the film was shot with a vintage spring-wound camera from the 1930s, the video is an exacting, if abstracted, three-dimensional computer simulation of the same nominal subjects – an industrial waterfront in Hunters Point, the Beaux-Arts rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, and Pacific Shores Center, a 1.7 million square foot office complex in Redwood Shores.

As art critic and author Lisa Turvey had written in Artforum (February 2009), “The dual projection [in Account] forces a continual brokering of two temporalities: the relative slowness of the projections themselves (filmed mostly in languid pans and gentle tilts) and the hypervigilant jumpiness necessary for the viewer to attend to both of them at once. That their subjects are nominally the same, and synchronized, only enhances the cognitive disconnect, and the ongoing spectatorial negotiations – moving back and forth between the two, noticing slight omissions and adjustments – occasion nothing less urgent than a meditation on how to certify or trust mediated experience.”

Ben Dean has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Netherlands. His solo exhibition Account opened at the Pomona College Museum of Art in November 2008. Dean studied at the Cooper Union, and received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA from Stanford University. From 2000-2004, he developed and taught new media courses at Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where he was interim director of what was formerly known as Stanford University Digital Art Center, now called Experimental Media Arts. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.