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Tom Dean Artist Statement In re: Desire, the Toronto Sculpture Garden, May 30 – September 15, 2001 I used to think a lot. I thought the world was full of voices. I thought that things were events, information hurling itself down through time. I thought that separateness was the fundamental quality of things. I thought that anxiety, formerly distributed homogeneously through space, had congealed into lumps and rhythmic patterns, providing the soil for more sophisticated and implausible anxieties, the flowering of anxiety into sentient forms. I thought that places were separate but miraculously linked, and that space and time and pleasure had emerged somewhere in the tension that occurs between places. I thought that the subterranean quality of all things was random and content free. I thought about the fatal attraction of singularities, patterns and significances, that draw us inexorably, like a magnet, but always sidestep gracefully just when we’re about to gore them, because we don’t live in God but outside of Him. I thought, So what? It doesn’t make my baby’s eyes bluer. I would go home early from a hot date for the voluptuous pleasure of thinking these things. I think now I’ve forgotten how to think. I feel like a hollowed out libidinous shell. I empathize with these swans. Fat flying snakes, meandering, labyrinthine momentum that has evolved a proud vertical architecture under the drag of gravity, and an appearance under the imperative gaze of others. These swans, in their proud maturity, are the hollowed out libidinous shells of a vanity, erect in the posture of pride and dignity. They are magnificent dinosaurs, monsters, heroic, tattered, ramshackle, bewildered and aghast. They are disbelieving and incredulous at the tide of ignorance and vanity rising in their wake. They are confronted by the cherubs – tender sensual particles, seed and fruit of the erotic body. They arch their feathers and rise to their full stature, doomed dignity confronted by the insolent self-assurance of the future. They are aghast before the naked cherubs, horrified at the vulgarity of youth, beauty and accomplishment. They are birdbrains. They are stunned, brainless, hollowed out erections addled by subtle termites, threatened and besieged, appearances betrayed by their own interiors, feathered shells out there on their own trying to make a go of it, wondering how many more times they will be obliged to unfold their arthritic peacock tails. An earlier version was also published in Canadian Art, Summer 2001 *
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