Little Island/Gut Punch

Dean’s sculpture Little Island/Gut Punch, which was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, is a case in point. The effervescent work is painted chroma- key green—the same color used for green-screening, the technique of filming a scene against a mono- chromatic green backdrop and then, in postproduc- tion, using a filter to replace the green background with different footage. The sculpture is mounted on a cylindrical pedestal painted the same hue. Formally, it is a simple, erect rectangular solid, roughly the size of the artist’s body—but one that appears to have been struck forcefully in its middle and is beginning to collapse in on itself (hence, the “gut punch”).