Dean’s Bed is Love, intimacy, dreams, longing, conceit, queerness, identity, authenticity and beauty. Made by Dean Hutton, with people, not of subjects – Chosen family, old friends, new friends, artists. Working, playing, with the participants to reveal, but not capture, ultimate expressions of self… a naked… bare self that holds agency. Shifting photographer to participant, creating relationships and abandoning distance. Making Love.
Like much of the artist’s work, this series of intimate portraits challenges what is “normal” outside of binary concepts of gender, embracing fluidity and a comfortable expression of difference. These issues of difference are particularly complex within an African context where Hutton’s white skin often places them as foreign to the continent while belonging nowhere else. Hutton deals deeply with the issue of whiteness in much of their work, particularly in their attempt to deconstruct the destructive possibilities of the white gaze and working with participants, never subjects, to disrupt the power relationships in the act of photography.
Dean’s Bed was presented at the 2014 Liste ArtFair Basel and FNB Joburg Artfair by Maria Fidel Regueros and ROOM gallery.