Press release for "Mark Dean Veca: Phantasmagoria"

              MEDIA RELEASE February, 2008
Media contact: Kathy MacPherson, galleryinfo@otis.edu, 310.665.6909
The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to announce that artist
Mark Dean Veca is the Fall 2008 Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lecturer and Resident.
Mark Dean Veca is the Fall 2008 Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lecturer and Resident (JHCDLR) in the Fine Arts Department at Otis from September 20 to November 14, 2008. An internationally acclaimed artist and Otis alumnus (Fine Arts, 1985), Veca will be working with students and conducting one-on-one critiques with senior and graduate level painting students, and presenting a free public lecture about his work during his residency.
Mark Dean Veca opens a site specific installation entitled Phantasmagoria on Saturday, October 11, 5-7pm at the Ben Maltz Gallery and is a featured highlight of the “Otis Celebrates 90 Years” homecoming weekend, taking place October 10-12, 2008. On view through December 6, Veca’s solo exhibition will introduce a new large-scale site-specific painting installation and is curated by Meg Linton, Director of the Ben Maltz Gallery and Public Programs. A catalogue documenting the exhibition and residency will be available in Spring 2009.
Marc Dean Veca was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1963. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in 1985. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Veca is renowned for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. Veca is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and inspire a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical and, at times, humorous, aggressive, or sexual imagery with frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often resemble a modernized interpretation of toile painting. In the 1998 catalogue for Veca’s El Gloominator exhibition, Steve Mitchell asserts that “Veca works in the meticulous tradition of the fresco painter to produce an image that paradoxically evokes the immediacy of the graffiti artist.”
Mark Dean Veca’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan at institutions such as The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Veca’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, Juxtapoz, and Flash Art. Amongst his many honors, Veca has twice received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006.
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