Movers in Neon Vests at Tiny Residencies: Artist Dorian Dean on Creating Community
Updated: 3 days ago
Re:Viewed by clay scofield
Fall 2026
RE:VIEW
Artist Dorian Dean creates work through collaboration and performance.
Their work often emerges through relationships and community and considers the constellation of conversation and labor that webs around art-making.
Dean originally published work from their series Straightforward in Brink No. 3: Currency, in spring 2022. I followed up with Dean to learn what they’ve been up to since they first shared their work with Brink. We discussed the artist residencies that they organize to bring friends together to collaborate and build community.
Dorian shared insight into their creative process, the vulnerability in collaboration and asking for help, and some of their own tricks to keep showing up to the work.
clay scofield: I participated in an informal residency you co-organized in Iowa City in the summer of 2025. Can you talk about the role of community in your work? And perhaps what role Iowa City has played in your development as an artist?
Dorian Dean: It usually takes time to build a creative community, but it was instantaneous upon arriving at the University of Iowa. I made many significant creative and personal relationships in my graduate program and in Iowa City. I maintain these connections across great distances through organizing residencies and making many phone calls to the people I love. In 2025, my friend Eli Rodriguez Fielder and I decided to co-organize a residency, and she generously offered to host in Iowa City. It also just so happened I was storing a gigantic unfinished project in her basement. I wanted to get it out of her basement and finally realize the project.
Most of my projects are motivated by relational connections. I’ve collaborated with Eli in the past. Our project A Rough Jotter explored the challenges of how to keep making art through so much personal doubt, especially after uprooting from Iowa City and relocating to New Haven, Connecticut. We created an artist’s book drawing from conversations of support and solidarity spanning many months. The residency was a way to invigorate our close friendship and creative relationship.
Eli and I curated a small group of people who were interested in working on specific projects and sharing their art practice with the community. We shared projects around communal meals and had loosely structured time to work on individual projects.
c: One thing I think about when I witness your process is how hybrid form emerges from collaborative processes. How do you bring people together? Do you have a story about how that process has informed the form your work takes?
DD: I definitely identify my work as interdisciplinary and hybrid. It mixes materials, places, and modes—film, photography, drawing, performance, and installation. I like to bring people together through playful invitations: a prompt, a time, a role.
I'm really alive in the classroom with my students. The improvisation that happens through material and social connections is so dynamic, especially with the kids I teach: 5 to 18 years old.
My neighborhood gym in New Haven has become an unexpected site of community and relationship building. For the first time in my life, I started to regularly attend group fitness classes, not realizing how exercise and performance are related until I had been doing it for a while. Speaking to your question about hybrid forms in my work: the gym has shaped a persona in myself that is capable of doing seemingly impossible tasks. I love that combination where serious and silly can live together—this is a theme that routinely comes up in my work. Dancing to Zumba songs and lifting weights in unison in a group fitness class is strangely intimate; the words exchanged, the ridiculous energy—sweating, huffing, and puffing in unison with people you slowly get to know. Week by week, that communal exertion becomes intimate. Bodies synchronize and remember shapes; a collective memory accrues. What started as exercise I begin to understand as performance. The erotic charge of breathing hard and giving myself permission not to take myself so seriously, using my body to move to a beat without overthinking, has taught me to apply this playful discipline across my life. The weekly commitment to these classes mirrors the structured accountability of a creative practice.
All I need to do is create deadlines and organize.
c: Can you catch us up on the life of the Straightforward series after publication in Brink?
DD: Yes! Text continues to be the main ingredient in my drawings. I like to use letters as building blocks to draw shapes by stacking them, sometimes to direct reading into multiple directions. The funny logic of Aesop’s Fables and the comic book stories of Leo Fox and Ron Regé, Jr. inspire me. Both create complete worlds with clear beginnings and endings combining image and text...That’s something I’m striving toward: I’m trying to get ideas out of my head and out in the world.
From the Straightforward series to my current projects, I’ve shifted away from working alone. For a long time, I subconsciously believed that working independently was the only way a “serious artist” could successfully make work. Yuck! It’s kind of gross to say out loud, and it has taken me a long time to recognize and break free from that narrative.
I’ve come to realize that I no longer want to be yoked to that restrictive framework, which feels deeply connected to a patriarchal idea of what an artist is supposed to be: solitary, autonomous, and completely self-sufficient. I’m much more interested now in collaboration, exchange, and the ways that making art can happen in relationship with other people.
The title Straightforward came from a playful exploration of words and their homonyms. “Straight” can mean heterosexual, but it can also mean a direction. The essay and artwork explored the absurdity and ridiculousness of language and everyday phrases through the narrative lens of an office folder. I know that probably sounds strange—but you’ll have to see it for yourself.
I enjoy a little mischief in my work. Through a queer lens, there are so many different ways to make art, and I know that openness has become increasingly important to me.
In the new ways I am making art I’ve been creating invitations for others to collaborate with me. Recent examples include organizing a team to compete in the 48 Hour Film Project here in New Haven this summer, the large panel project I staged and filmed during the Iowa City Residency in summer 2025, the Goldie House collaborative film residency I organized in summer 2024, the Open Air Media Festival project ALL IN A DAY’S WORK: PRODUCTION OF LUCK in 2023 and a co-curated interactive exhibition called TIT for TAT at PS1 Iowa City.
The common thread in these projects is creating “situations” within a set duration, allowing them to play out and then capturing them on film and in photography to use as material. This approach began with the Straightforward series published in Brink and has since grown.
When Nina Lohman, the founder and publisher of Brink, asked me to contribute the Straightforward series to the Currency issue of Brink, it was an incredible opportunity to actualize my work beyond the preciousness of the one-of-a-kind artwork. Brink invited me to combine my writing and art practices, which I hadn’t imagined before. It gave me new insight into how I want my work to exist in the world. To this day, it continues to be so satisfying to see Straightforward in print.
c: How would you consider a performance score or documentation of performance as a hybrid form?
DD: A performance score can be like a letter in the mail. It is a form meant to be distributed or shared with another to read and respond. It is an instructional, often poetic, framework that turns a temporary event into something reproducible yet variable. Scores are both structural and material: they shape direction and movement while leaving room for interpretation. I enjoy bird’s-eye photography as documentation that translates the ephemerality of a performance into a flattened archival image. The event becomes a composition, legible beyond the time and place of the original action. The score, the act, and the document together are a hybrid work.
c: I participated in an experiment you directed with a performance score and large objects, instructing a set of performers or (en)actors to manipulate these large objects, creating arrangements that you documented from above.
Can you speak to the evolution of your work in this performance, particularly in terms of scale (being the scale of collaboration or the scale of objects)? I see scale as a theme in our conversation: the intimacy of a residency hosted with friends, the distribution of an art idea through printed matter, these physically large cumbersome objects manipulated by “movers” in neon vests. I’m interested in your thoughts on scale as it relates to your current projects.
DD: The residency project was a huge learning experience because of its scale. The four panels were about six-feet tall by four-feet wide and heavy; I had to rely on others to lift and move them while I acted as director. I borrowed my friend’s truck to transport the panels to the Coralville Dam spillway. The spillway is an expansive concrete canvas that I always envisioned for the site of this installation that I would film from above. I am continually interested in how perspective shifts experience, abstracting forms from recognition into new configurations. This echoes the NEVER NOW exhibition I made in 2020, right before Covid, where I used tarps and painters' drop cloths on the ground as canvases to arrange made and found objects. Using the ground allowed unfixed compositions that responded to the space and could change.
The large panels introduced a new variable: asking other people to move them as I directed. To take on one singular role as director was interesting because I wanted to be doing everything. ALL IN A DAY’S WORK: PRODUCTION OF LUCK performance I created for the Open Air Media Festival at PS1 in 2023 is another example of inviting multiple people to collaborate through a designated task—lassoing the Public Space 1 building in Iowa City with ropes—to build a story together. I don’t usually call people “performers”; it feels too formal for some reason. For the panel project, I called my residency peers “movers,” reflecting my ongoing obsession in utility and the “job” aspect of the work.
I provided a uniform of neon vests, gloves, and simple role cues; an invitation score that made the four people moving the panels visible and coordinated in an alternating color pattern: yellow, orange, yellow, orange. On a very hot summer evening, arrangements emerged from each body’s improvisation in relation to each panel: how the large upright rectangles connected symmetrically, how the neon pairs alternated, and how the ground became a drawn field from the bird’s-eye view I documented. Chalk was used to draw lines as connection points to the panels. It definitely felt like a dance.
The scale changed everything: physically, socially, and conceptually. It required bodies beyond my own; the movers used strength and endurance. I had questions about labor: friends versus hires. One of my favorite artists, Mika Rottenberg, uses the hiring process for her films to inform the outcome of her work. I definitely reflected on how different the outcome would have been if I had hired people I didn’t know as intimately. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so bad asking them to sweat and move those giant panels. The collective of movers also erased singular origins as large forms recombined into new shapes. I documented the emerging compositions from multiple perspectives to preserve the temporary arrangements as photographic images.
I had to ask for help out of necessity, and learned again that deadlines force decisions, clarity of instruction matters for consent, and improvisation remains essential to the outcome.
c: From my own experience, I’m witnessing a lot of anxiety for artists and writers in response to technological disruption, environmental collapse, and major changes in funding and support for the arts and culture. For me, collaboration and performance emphasize local and relational strategies for meaning-making, which I think are essential to address the urgent crises of our contemporary moment. On a positive note, I’m curious in what ways you feel optimistic about contemporary art or your role as an artist in our world.
DD: Great questions! I believe the role of the artist is to question and disrupt the beliefs we assume as truths. I believe in maintaining a relationship to discomfort through questioning, experimentation, and most importantly, process. Even the definition of process is to not know the outcome and to find out by doing. I am interested in the tension between structure and chance. More than ever in this moment in the year 2026, building relationships in community is the remedy to these enormous catastrophic and existential crises.
c: Finally, we always like to ask what you’re reading. What are you reading or looking at that you’re particularly excited about right now?
DD: I am at the very end of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and it's blowing my mind! She wrote the book in 1993 and it takes place in 2025–2027—what she foresaw is chillingly accurate. We should all be reading this book as a world right now.
DORIAN DEAN Dorian Dean (they/them) is an artist and educator based in New Haven, Connecticut. They received a BFA in Painting and Sculpture at Tyler School of Art, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting at the University of Iowa. Dean's practice is rooted in collaboration, play, and the creation of temporary situations where bodies, objects, language, and place come together. Influenced by Fluxus and queer approaches to art-making, Dean is drawn to ambiguity and the tension between structure and chance, allowing meaning to emerge through relationships, improvisation, and the experience of making together.
Intermedia artist and poet, CLAY SCOFIELD (Brink Associate Arts Editor, they/them) creates multimedia work that threads poetic narrative, performance and moving image. clay’s work is featured in publications including Black Warrior Review, Number, and Wussy. They have performed and exhibited nationally and held residencies with Cucalorus and The School of Making Thinking (SMT). They have MFAs in digital art (Indiana University, Bloomington) and poetry (Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and serve on the board of directors of SMT. clay is always on the brink of over-caffeination.
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