Woodcuts

Tom Dean is a senior Toronto artist working in sculpture, painting, video, drawing and printmaking.  The eight woodcut prints in this exhibition from the MacLaren’s Permanent Collection are made with construction-grade plywood pressed on paper. Each print depicts a singular, puddle-like shape based on the idea of a melted six-sided die. The black, sublimated forms lack structure: drained of all potential energy, their horizontality is a fundamental consequence of gravity. Evoked here are existential themes that continue to inform Dean’s thinking: dichotomies between horizontality and verticality, form and the collapse of form.