The Art Gallery of York University presents an exhibition by English artist Tacita Dean from October 18 to November 19, 2000. This exhibition features three short 16mm films, projected in the gallery on continuous loop. Over the past ten years Tacita Dean has produced a body of work that examines the narrative and formal structures of film, video, sound, and drawing. Reworking the boundary between art and cinema, Dean is one of a number of contemporary artists who have chosen to work in the relatively fragile medium of film.

Guest curated by Michael Newman, the exhibition includes the films Bubble House (1999), Sound Mirrors (1999) and Delft Hydraulics (1996). Though their subjects are various — an incomplete and abandoned hurricane-proof home on Cayman Brac, the ineffective sound mirrors at Denge by Dungeness in Kent, and a wave machine outside of Delft — the films share a focus on futuristic visions made obsolete.

Elegies to modern relics, the films are joined in this exhibition by an audio work, Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty. Described as a cross between a travelogue and a radio play, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty is a recording of the attempt Dean made with a friend to follow the directions to Robert Smithson’s famed earth work.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, Tacita Dean has had solo exhibitions at Witte de With (Rotterdam, 1997) the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, 1998), and the Museum für Gegenwartkunst (Basel, 2000). Dean’s work is included in La Biennale de Montréal 2000, and a major exhibition of her films, photographs and drawings will be held at the Tate Britain in February 2001. This exhibition at the AGYU is guest curated by Michael Newman, art critic and Principal Lecturer in Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London. A catalogue will be produced to accompany the exhibition.