Floh, Tacita Dean

Artwork Overview

Tacita Dean, Floh
Tacita Dean, Floh
Tacita Dean
Floh
2001
Tacita Dean, artist
born 1965
Floh, 2001
Where object was made: North and Central America
Material/technique: offset lithograph
Dimensions:
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 30.2 x 24.7 x 2.2 cm
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 11 7/8 x 9 3/4 x 0 7/8 in
Credit line: Gift of Joe and Barb Zanatta
Accession number: 2009.0169
Not on display
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Images

Label texts

The images in Floh come from old photographs Tacita Dean collected from American and European flea markets. Vacation snapshots, formal portraits, and candid photographs of everyday life point to specific moments of time that are long past. Dean presents these anonymous memories free of contextual information so that they form a random, non-linear narrative.

Exhibitions

Past Presence
Sara Stepp, curator
2020

Resources

Audio

Hear a SWMS student's perspective.
Audio Tour – Bulldog Art Tour
Hear a SWMS student's perspective.
Audio Tour – Bulldog Art Tour
Our current “today” has shifted drastically from the carefree images printed in Tacita Dean’s Floh. Floh is a bound collection of antique photographs Dean accumulated from flea markets throughout America and Europe. Each page contains a vignette of a candid moment from past times, deliberately printed without context. This is the beauty of Floh: the simplicity and freedom of being unconstrained in your own interpretation of the scene, without regard to its initial circumstances. Dean randomly selected and published these images, forming a theme of history rather than an individual narrative. Within Floh's pages are bustling family photos, capturing lively reunions and get-togethers. And yet Dean did not fail to include the opposite virtues, incorporating calm compositions of nature, devoid of humanity, speaking of solitude and peace. The one characteristic I noticed in each of these photographs, however, is strength. I found it in the beaming children, the oblivious onlooker, and in the stillness of the landscapes. This subtle power is reinforced by the minimalism of their presentation: the images are not supplemented by intricate embellishments or edited heavily. Dean left the photographs in their original forms and transferred them to Floh using offset lithography. Floh's simplicity led it to be powerful in its photographs' display of strength, no matter how apparent or concealed it is. And though the images were inconsistent and randomly chosen, their depictions fused into a theme from the past: strength. This was Julia Kwan, in a segment of the Bulldog Audio Tour.