Herald St (Museum St) – Michael Dean: Kiss Emitting Die Odes

In this his fourth solo exhibition at Herald St, Kiss Emitting Die Odes, Michael Dean’s works operate within the architecture of the gallery for want of the body of a book. Walls are pages, corners are binding spines that publish a lexicon landscape of kisses. Kisses that bruise and hickey untouched surfaces in search of something. Leaving behind an empathic capacitor of fragility and jouissance. Thirty-five works made up of extra virgin olive oil and lipstick kisses dusted with cement are combined in their purest form for Dean to pout his lips, to kiss and fix a language of abstracted, visceral typographies, that beg reception and return. Kisses pixel and punctuate into syntactic secreted autonomies, eventually resembling a “cement sculpture thin as ink”.