Rosanna Dean
My practice is concerned with art’s role in disseminating the stories our culture tells us, (be they historical, religious or mythological) and how they affect our beliefs and the way our realities are constructed.
I explore multiple perspectives and how authorship provides a possibility for a different future. By retelling historical narratives from a contemporary female perspective I question the authority of the way hegemonic history has been constructed. The source imagery is often female bodies from art history, and blends the figure with vanitas paintings, re framing the past and calling into question what we consider to be alive or inert matter.
I create digital collages from photographs I have taken of historical artworks and blend them in a complex inter-relational manner which dissolve their singular narrative which allows for new compositions and narratives to emerge. The collages become references for paintings. I use traditional art techniques and art history to engage with the past and play with the authority it carries. The work wrestles with the past and the present, the trauma that can result of these stories being imposed upon us and how this is held in the body, unresolved until we find our own belief systems and way of telling our own stories.
