Now Leaves

Fast-moving contemporary British artist Michael Dean explores different
relationships between the word as idea and the word as material form in his
sculptural and, at times, photo-based works. His newest artist book, Now Leaves,
scaled to the human hand about the same size and weight along with a similarly
flexible structure feels alive. The newsprint-light pages fall loosely apart to reveal
dense black graphics; the letters, shaped as tongues and twisted to form a
barely legible word, leaves, are inscribed repeatedly. Dean s work, which also
includes poetry, short plays and performances, has been exhibited recently at
Cubitt, London; Kunstverein Freiburg; and Nomas Foundation, Rome. Austrian-
British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that in principle there can
be no such thing as a private language an untranslatable lexicon of which only
one person can make sense. According to Michael Dean, in practice the opposite
would seem to be the case.