Joel Dean

Notes on the Fall of Emphasis

February 15–March 23, 2024

If you’re reading this, we’re doing it again—beginning with the end. The thing’s afterthoughts have been shaped into its introduction. Words of summary reordered into preview. Our ritual of looking forward by looking back has come full circle. So let's look back, back to the future. The date is February 15th, 2024. An exhibition is opening. It’s my exhibition. All my friends are there. The city's most celebrated critics are there. Members of the general public. Collectors too. You’re there. We’re all standing there, together at the edge of time. 

And who was it that said the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once? Who was it that told me the Earth’s axial tilt is 23.5 degrees? That it spins at just over 1000 miles per hour? The fast life. Life at a diagonal. Up and Down. Simultaneously and in succession. Dramatic. The heavier the engagement, the harder the engagement can be to accurately locate on a timeline. Duration warps in scale as it’s weighed down, held in place by memory. A future unfolding in retrospect reveals the mirrored perspectives of many new angles. Crystalized. Self-reflective. A change of pace. Beautiful. A song.

For that matter a coin; a coin so beautiful it can’t be circulated. The total absence of value minted in a timeless way. A procession of countless deposits in the memory bank spin motionless in a limited time forever. Life on a global scale hangs in the balance of heavy light. A frequency is accelerating in its current form while this type of vibration is spelling out how things become other things, like an oscillation generating a buzz.

Can you remember where you were when it first leaned forward into the bent crook of a slanted, upward-angled arm, while raising the opposite arm out straight in a parallel direction? What bomb-born sad celebratory bow pointed out to the sky some twenty-thirty years after the fact allowed itself an echo? Hiding its face with the grandness of a piano as it seeped through the years gathering this now. With each fall harder into the future because over time gravity consolidates into a single key. 

And entropy also increases with time, so it might be time to ask ourselves—how accurate can any clock be? A forward motion reveals the slant of its approach. Like a second hand tracing the curve of the horizon as it leans into itself, rhythm is a graceful conductor. Even so, nobody has the developmental tools to deal with the end of the world, maybe that's what all the fuss is about. Maybe that’s why you’re reading this, why we’re doing it again—ending with the beginning.

—Joel Dean, 2024

Joel Dean (b. 1986, Atlanta) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2022); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2021); Prairie, Chicago (2019); Cordova, Barcelona (2019); and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2018). Selected recent group exhibitions include Simone Subal, New York (2023); Someday, New York (2021); Annex de Odelon, New York (2021); P.P.O.W, New York (2020); Bodega (Derosia), New York (2020); Tatjana Peters, Ghent (2020); Gern en Regalia, New York (2019); MX Gallery, New York (2019, 2018).