From the bookshelf: Victoria J Dean - 'The Illusion of Purpose'

This beautiful and mysterious new book from Victoria J Dean is published by Another Place Press, a champion of contemporary landscapes. 

She offers no explanation of what these imposing structures are, or what their purpose might have been, instead leaving it to our imagination. This project was singled out by the jury of Lens Culture's Emerging Talent Awards 2017.

"Technology is restructuring our communication methods, transforming our perceptions and interactions with our environment, and rendering the physical realm comparatively cumbersome and slow. Disconnected from the modern digital world, these material structures and the systems in which they once functioned are obsolete. With the simplicity and directness of a symbolic form, each structure withholds its message, alluding to a relic from a forgotten language.

The Illusion of Purpose explores ideas of materiality, monumentality and the sculptural, questioning the relevance of the physical in our increasingly virtual age, and in a world of communication hijacked by technology."

Untitled II (The Illusion of Purpose), 2017 © Victoria J. Dean

Untitled V (The Illusion of Purpose), 2017 © Victoria J. Dean

Untitled IV (The Illusion of Purpose), 2017 © Victoria J. Dean

Untitled VIII (The Illusion of Purpose), 2017 © Victoria J. Dean