There is a term in archaeology, known as anastylosis, defined as: the archaeological reassembly of ruined monuments from fallen or decayed fragments, incorporating new materials when necessary. This is akin to a description of how Jeremy Dean sees his works, except that he often follows this process in reverse. He takes monuments or symbols and breaks them down into fragments, incorporates some new material and then puts them back together as objects that he feels confronts issues critical to contemporary society. As an artist, Dean very much believes in the necessity of art as a way to understand the world.

Like an archaeologist these works are carefully researched with elements excavated from disparate places in geography, time and memory, then reinterpreted and reassembled as highly crafted objects that carry an underlying sense of decay.

On show at the exhibition is the rendered flag series in which he takes apart the American and Chinese flags, string by string, completely disassembling them into two separate flags made only of vertical and horizontal strings respectively. The end of each string is thread through a needle, then placed over prints of polarizing imagery. He feels that the extreme polarization currently experienced by many first world countries - socially, economically and politically, is literally rendering the fabric of our society, and these works are therefore physical representations of these conditions.

For Dean, these vertical and horizontal strings, once separated, become paradigms for viewing the world; that once polarized as opposite can never again fully integrate.

Jeremy Dean was born in 1977 in the USA, has a BFA from Flagler College, St Augustine, Florida and a Masters from the School of Filmmaking from Kona in Hawaii. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.