These works are joined by a later body of large bronze works produced for an exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto in 1992, an extension and expansion on the Excerpts  series. The bronzes are more articulated than the Excerpts, however; the bronze forms ­ a vessel with a hair base, twelve hunter's horns, three jackal-like dogs with long human hair tails, and two severed female legs and genitalia ­ maintain the offbeat and otherworldly nature of the earlier forms.     Perceive these works as a toddler would. The forms are as curious, sensual and enticing as a seashell seen for the first time. This exercise in seeing the world for the first time is at the core of this production. Identification in Dean's world is not based on cultural signifiers but rather on the emergence of a new vocabulary. This vocabulary is predicated on the transformative, procreative nature of things.   The life form extracts material from the environment by drawing material through itself, some absorbed and some expelled. In primitive organisms the stomach is the cave, one orifice both oral and anal. We separate oral and anal functions to form a tube or donut, a flow-container. Mouth and anus are separate but co-extensive, each with its distinct psychology and passions, one decorated and one hidden. ­ Tom Dean       Parallel to this procreative view of nature is Dean's concurrent preoccupation with hell. Categorically, the work seen in this dark vein is more personal, indulgent and brutal than the above-mentioned sculptural work. Girl, 1989, a foam stump approximately the height of an adolescent girl's legs, ankle to hip, is draped with a white sheet that falls in folds and at the base fans out into a sunburst formation on the floor. The dress-like effect over the truncated form is serenely quiet, while alluding to the violence of the severed body. The title, Girl, in context with the form implies sexuality and abuse. More graphic, although equally compelling, is Dean's 1990 installation It Comes From the Heart. This work, installed in a warehouse basement in Toronto, is essentially a very large pool of blood (water and pigment) juxtaposed with tombs of milk. The nightmarish quality of the blood-bathed space is surreal. The heightened theatrics of the installation are conspicuous because the reality would be simply too frightening. The intent of this work is further articulated when seen in context with an image/text work completed in the same year.   If you don't die when you get married you die when you have kids. You make love and then your wife goes to the hospital and they cut her open and send her home scarred and flabby with a livid vampire clinging to her breast. You're given the embodiment of your darkest nightmare, a parasitic extortionist incapable of coordinated motion, unable to speak, reason, or control its bowels, yet absolutely your master. All it can do is suck and scream, and it has a voice invented in hell. ­ Tom Dean, "Age, Death, Kids, Power."  First published in Impulse  magazine, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1990       This brutal (in the words of Tom Dean) text informs a set of images. The tandem images, beautiful abstract shapes on a white ground, are each inscribed with the word "hell." The shapes are intended to represent biscuits or cookies while also calling up the amoebic Excerpts  forms. The juxtaposition of playful images with the "hell" texts creates a situation that is both perverse and plausible. Other prints, printed on newsprint 3 x 4 feet, use Dean's same catalogue of amoebic shapes inscribed with text. The catalogue of words and phrases formulate a postmortem vocabulary: dead, heroin, "fear not," forgive. This work is pivotal in determining the transformative and transcendent perspective in this stream of Dean's work.     Perceive this work as if in purgatory. Like a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. In confronting fear and horror one can be absorbed or repelled.   It's idiotic to pretend you can't change nature. Culture is a struggle against the natural. ­ Daniel Mendelsohn       Tom Dean steers away from defining nature or our reality. Rather, he presents us with a point of departure. He does this by setting up a series of open-ended relationships or associations, be they magical or hellish. Dean has been described as a philosopher of the soul, a creator of cosmology, a soothsayer and an alchemist. I would tag him a visionary, but qualify this in that I do not believe Dean has a predetermined philosophy or direction in which he intends to lead us. Like his practice, which vacillates between periods of intense production and stasis, and his process which, at times, revels in futility, Dean is as much a player in life's realities as we are. Like many artists, Dean addresses the human condition; however, in this effort he veers away from navel-gazing and fosters the potential for a universal reading. As viewers we are thrust into an alien world, with few cultural signifiers and even fewer answers. Essentially what Dean does is pull the rug out from under us. He throws us back into the embryonic fluid of the beginning of time. It is from this warm place that we can see.