Dean Hutton

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2021 

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Goldendean Reflecting
Augmented Reality 3D Sculpture 2020

Invite a manifestation of Goldendean into your sacred/ safe spaces for a moment of reflection with the help of the FNB JHB Art Fair augmented reality platform. Goldendean presents moments of radical softness celebrating the right of bodies like theirs to be seen as beautiful, safe, and loveable. In these “comfort objects”, glowing, breathmaking sculptures that tenderly defy the social violence that would rather see bodies like ours triggered and traumatised, invisible and erased  the tenderqueer resists - developing intimate works at the intersection of art and love... asking us to feel, even from the centre of attention.

Hutton’s practice does not approach any medium in isolation. Their installations are affective on more than the aesthetic of the seen, but by an invitation to feel – the experience of lived moments referenced from real-life. Particularly effective in public space where an audience can be an unexpected participant in the projection of meaning, transgressing the fourth wall separating artist, art object, and audience – Their body enacts the sculptural and inhabits the temporary monument at every stage of their performance and performativity, in an innovative approach that reinforces direct engagement – whether as installation in an experiential space to reference, or exploit the emotional resonances of real life or imagined happenings.

In an evolving public performance, as Goldendean, their strategy of simple and often improvised, disruptive actions by a “Fat Queer White Trans body” share moments of soft courage to affirm the right of all bodies to exist, to be celebrated and protected. By bringing their body onto display Goldendean and welcoming selfies and documentation by the audience their body becomes a monument the moment that image is made, to be shared, forever frozen at that point in memory. And when it is not possible to bring an exhibition to life, particularly for safety sake they have worked to develop virtual exhibitions into being. Unconstrained by budget and gravity, they design spaces as soft and curvy as their own body and invite all to the potential for future collaborations beyond the physical world.

Made as research objects, these drawings, doodles, stencils and digital works many of these marks were often made as self-care, in defiance of threats of violence, transphobia and body shaming against the artist’s body, gender expression and right to free expression. This process lays the framework for the design of sculptural works bridging the poetic and material potential of Goldendean's transmuta(n)t body. These include a range of amorphous “comfort objects'' that prioritise the haptic experience. Art that disrupts the convention that says the fine art object should not be touched. Art that is an invitation to consensual contact – as innocent as a hug, art you can hold, art that holds you. Or an object of bold eroticism, unashamedly sensuous…

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