JG

Inspired from her correspondence with the British author J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) about his short story ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960) and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film, Spiral Jetty (both 1970), JG responds to a challenge that Ballard proposed to Dean shortly before he died: to treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would resolve. Employing her signature ‘aperture gate masking’ technique, in which she uses stencil-like masks to alternately cover up and re-expose her film, Dean combines images shot at different locations and times to produce visual and conceptual juxtapositions within the space of the individual 35mm frames. Shot on several locations in both Utah and California, the images of landscape became entwined with Smithson’s Jetty and Ballard’s short story.