Danielle Dean This could all be yours! at Spike Island

About

Danielle Dean’s work spans video, painting, installation, social practice and performance. Drawing on archival records, film and advertising, Dean’s practice interrogates how individuals are shaped by commercial narratives and explores historical and contemporary representations of labour, racialised identity and popular culture. Her projects are often developed collaboratively with community members, whose experiences bring essential perspectives to the work.

Dean’s exhibition at Spike Island centres around Hemel, a new film that serves both as a personal essay and a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, where she grew up. The film explores the town’s history as a planned community established under the New Towns Act of 1946. Archive footage and images of the town today interweave with references to Quartermass II, a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot there about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. In the film, Dean takes on a composite role inspired by both herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, blending real and imagined worlds to examine the town’s past and present.

Shot on 16mm film with a cast of non-actors and family, Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original film, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class and labour dynamics of a small English town in today’s post-Brexit context.

Accompanying Hemel is a series of drawings that capture the dystopian atmosphere that permeates the film and its characters, further immersing viewers in the unsettling world Dean constructs.

Free entry