FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies, 2009

Tom Dean - Toronto, Canada

Visual Art

The fires and the Liberty district's remove, the trace of the feral, suggest the aftermath of a collapse, a catastrophe or apocalypse. But what the artist is interested in is the calm after a fall, when we count our mercies and shared the surplus.  An economic collapse that has returned us to essentials, warmth and food and social generosity. 

FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies is a social sculpture.  It engages and arranges people.  Participants congregate around a fire, a cooking station, clustered radially around food and fire.  The form remains, enlarging and diminishing, a stable form centered around food and fire.  All the complexity and richness and pathos of a social cluster, strangers and friends with some common purpose and focal point, a clustered audience before a spectacle and themselves a spectacle, figures joining and departing the cluster and flowing from one site to another.

Tom Dean is a visual artist, currently living and working in Toronto. He has made paintings, videos and multiples, but is best known for his sculpture. Dean represented Canada at the 1999 Venice Biennale and was the recipient of a Governor General's Visual Arts Award in 2001. Tom Dean is represented in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montrél, Musée d'art contemporain de Montrél, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Suitable for all ages