Tom Dean and his work remain in the margins of the nether world of Canadian art. This, it seems, is not an intentional positioning on the part of the artist. He is neither a bad boy nor a shit disturber. Dean claims that art is failure manifest, and yet it is the vocation he fell into and cannot transcend. Whether one chooses to adopt Dean's view or not, one cannot help but see the limitations of this vocation, particularly in Canada, where the commercial system lags behind the magnitude and wealth of the American system, and fame for artists is, if attainable in this country at all, minimal. Dean, however, remains one of the few Canadian artists to surface continually as a participant and inspiration on the scene. Tom Dean's career parallels the development of contemporary art in Canada which is highly dependent on artist-run, government funded, non-profit spaces. Dean's career began in Montréal within alternative venues such as Véhicule Art Inc., an artist-run centre formed in the early 70s, of which he was a founding member. At that time Dean also published a magazine entitled Beaux-Arts  which ran from 1972 through 1974. Throughout the seventies and early eighties Dean worked on the fringe of visual culture: producing videotapes, using computer technology, performing, teaching and creating events in addition to making objects and painting. Dean, with other influential Canadian artists such as General Idea, Michael Morris,Vincent Trasov and Image Bank, formed a notable, and perhaps uniquely Canadian, interdisciplinary approach to working which, for him, has remained relatively unchanged over the past twenty years.

     For the sake of this discussion it is best to outline what I view as two "streams of consciousness." These streams can be used to divide Dean's work over the past twenty years into two general groups which at times collide or intersect. One stream could be loosely defined as the search for the nature of things: form, surface, orifice, material. For the sake of definition, I will call this the procreative stream, the other one being the acknowledgement of evil: brutality, decay, death. Although it is tempting to view these streams as dichotomous (life/death, good/bad, positive/negative), I view these seemingly disparate streams as similar, with both bodies of work ultimately concerned with the transcendence of form and meaning as it currently exists. This notion of transcendence is also evident in the repetitive and often redundant artmaking processes employed in much of Dean's practice.

    In 1978, Dean constructed a large square floating staircase, rising thirty feet and obsessively painted with dots. This imposing but benign object remained floating in Toronto's harbour until Dean videotaped the burning and ultimate destruction of the futile structure. Regarding this piece, "Dean speaks of the directional motion inherent in its structure, of spatial and spiritual movements, human impulses towards verticality and horizontality, of vertical aspiration and the anti-heroism of the horizontal, of a will to power versus a will to grace."(1) These primal and essential characteristics addressed in Dean's work as early as 1978 ­ vertical, horizontal, topology, appearance, and surface ­ are repeatedly referred to in the subsequent discussion of his sculpture. They are most evident in Dean's most ambitious and notable series, Excerpts From A Description Of The Universe, produced between 1985 and 1989. These curiously bulbous objects ranging in size from 2mm to 1.5m are positioned on a series of metal examining tables. The scientific presentation of the objects implies a usefulness or purpose to the objects, although the objects themselves are without function. Instead these forms serve as signifiers. The mass of disparate objects, usually cast in steel, are vaguely recognizable, not quite abstract but not representational either: is it a turd, hunter's horn, snake or hook?