Tacita Dean: Pantone Pairs
It is generally believed that the more time you spend with a work of art, the more of it’s meaning will emerge from the materials and creative forces that went into making it. When you spend as much time as I do in the gallery—as I am while writing this—you gain an extended layer of this meaning by having all sorts of conversations with visitors, ranging from students to passersby to curators and scholars. One such moment, while surrounded by the nostalgic beauty of Tacita Dean’s Pantone Pairs, occurred when a connoisseur of history slowly stepped away from the salon-style hanging and tenderly said, “Artist’s don’t make work like this anymore.”
Tacita Dean has forged unique and intimate relationships with mediums and processes that have, for lack of a better term, hung on for dear life in the face of technological and cultural extinction. When you really slow down and think about it, the artist’s Pantone Pairs are the intellectual and aesthetic personification of this preservation effort—a poetic entanglement of disparate relics (flea market postcards and a vintage set of Pantone color swatches) brought together by the artist’s gesture in collaboration with Gemini Masterprinter Case Hudson (mixing and matching complementary colors, hand-applying them to both cards, and sending them through a small etching press to be fused together).
Chris Santa Maria, Director
Photos of the artist at work © 2019 Sidney B. Felsen
"I learn a lot about the places I’m visiting from postcards, they can be a false souvenir as well as a false memory."
Tacita Dean
"The artist can evoke a place that will always only exist as a memory of another place in the mind of the viewer, because I think you need to have visited a place before you can really know it, and then only you will know it in that way. That is why place is so personal and intangible, but at the same time universally understood."
Tacita Dean
