Hemel

Danielle Dean
UK | 2024 | 16MM> DIGITAL | 32 MIN | English

Filmed in 16mm with an ensemble of non-actors and family, Danielle Dean’s new film is a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, where she was raised, and unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act.

Hemel, Danielle Dean (2024). Production Still. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York.
AFK | Exhibitions

Out of this World

Known for her illustration style, cutout standees, and immersive video installations, British-American artist Danielle Dean produces bold environments to ground and enliven her rhizomatic, research-based projects. Her practice examines historical representations and contemporary conditions of labour, racialized identity, and popular culture. Her projects are often produced collaboratively with community members, whose experiences bring crucial perspective to the work.  

 

Commissioned for her solo exhibition Out of this World, Dean’s new film is a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, where she was raised in the UK. It unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s protagonist, Dean’s extraordinary vantage brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. 

Filmed in 16mm with an ensemble of non-actors and family, Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context. As she excavates recent events and personal histories that have transformed Hemel Hempstead, an encroaching dark flood, a growing shadow, a rising plume of smoke build layers of mystery throughout the work. Rows of identical housing, uniformed workers, and emptied lots signal an eerie tone within the mundane, drawing connections between the post-war ideals of the development corporation that established the town, and the mega-corporations shaping life and industry today. 

 

Danielle Dean’s Out of this World is the seventh project developed through Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform, and Dean’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada. 

Presenting Support for Danielle Dean: Out of this World is provided by The Vega Foundation. 

Hemel (2024) is co-commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto; Spike Island, Bristol; and The Vega Foundation. The film is produced by LONO Studio and made possible with the generous support of Patrick Collins, Jill and Peter Kraus, Patrick and Daniela Schmitz-Morkramer, and an Anonymous Donor.

Curated by
Aamna Muzaffar
CC♿
Date / Time
April 13, 2024–
June 15, 2024
Conversation

Artist talk with Danielle Dean:

April 14th at 12pm

TIFF - Cinema 4

350 King St W, Toronto ON

M5V 3X5

Location
Mercer Union

1286 Bloor St W TUE–SAT: 11AM–6PM SUN, MON: CLOSED

Mercer Union is located at street level and has an accessible ground-floor washroom, with clear, unobstructed pathways within the gallery. Please note that there are no automatic doors at the entrance or washroom.

Mercer Union is committed to ensuring equal access and participation for people with disabilities. We welcome service animals and support persons onto our premises. If you require additional accommodations, please send an email to office@mercerunion.org.

For a map to Mercer Union, click here

(ARTIST)

Danielle Dean
Presented With:

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all. 

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us. 

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.