Marge dean

PAINTINGS, ANIMATION, ART

I studied art at UC San Diego Visual Arts Department back in the 1970s.It was a hot bed of conceptual and performance artists as well as experimental film and video makers. I currently work in TV animation.

In art school, I learned to look through the world, rather than at it. I was always fascinated by the conceptual construct of everyday life. In entertainment, I learned how to tell a story and engage an audience by touching what’s important to them in the moment.

I am combining the learnings from both to produce my unique vision… and maybe have an impact on how you see the world.

“Franzika Kline’s Orange Veil (1962)

broken dishes

I come from a long line of housewives. Irish and German women working in the home, raising 4-8 children each. All committed to their family’s well being and care.

I got married. He was a doctor. We had two children. I worked in the home for about four years. It was killing my soul. I knew the importance of what I was doing for my children and husband. But I could not shake that I was invisible.To the world, the work I did had no value.

But what if it did have value? What if humanity valued it highly? What would that mean for women and their status in the world? How would our perspective on work and maintenance have to change in order to elevate the value of housework to the level of fine arts? We would have to value maintenance as much as we value innovation. Then sustainability would be the foundation of everything we did.We would move away from extractive capitalism towards an ideaology of renewal, restoration and maintenance.

36" X 48" ink on canvas

“THE SWEEPERS”

SHOW OPENING: NOV.7, 2025

AUTOMATA GALLERY, CHINATOWN, LOS ANGELES, CA

Floor Field Cleaning

A style of abstract housework that emerged in New York during the 1940s and 1950s, marked a decisive turn in the history of modern domestic abstraction.

Derived in part from European modernist homemaking and closely related to Abstract Housework, the movement priviledged unity of surface over gestural drama. Its defining characteristic was the expansive, unbroken clarity of stained or soaked linoleum, in which dirt was divorced from its context and cleanliness itself became the subject.

Figures such as Marcia Rothko, Clyffie Still, Barrette Newman, and Robin Motherwell each developed variants of the field idiom.

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