Chelsea Dean (b. 1978, Phoenix) earned her BA in Studio Art from the University of Puget Sound and MFA in Drawing from Claremont Graduate University. Since 2005 she has worked and lived in Los Angeles. ​Dean’s studio practice includes printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpture, and collage techniques, exploring architecture, home life, personal artifacts, and the decay of domestic ideals. Her process involves thoughtful exploration, documentation, gathering, and reimagining of both urban and rural landscapes.

My current body of work explores systems that erode and the conflict between order and entropy. Inspiration is found where I live and work in Southern California: both in Los Angeles and Wonder Valley. Iconic Mid Century architecture and design, shelters built by optimistic homesteaders now abandoned, evidence of domesticity, discarded personal artifacts, and the arid landscape, which is both brutal and sublime—my exploration, documentation, and imagining of these elements are incorporated into the work. Combining photographs, experimental printmaking, drawing, collage techniques, and installation, I assign new meaning. The work reveals both beauty and decay, dimensionally layering information spatially, revealing elements of the original object or ideal, as well as imagination of its inevitable destruction.

Exhibitions:

The Dinner Party