Michael Dean, Brian Dedora Hand Crossed & Shadow Fall

Using black-and-white, analogue photography, Brian Dedora explores two expressions of human signing that encompass both gestural uncertainty and posed uncertainty.

First, Dedora documents a performance by Michael Dean that enacts the stylized poses from Renaissance painting, which, in the Fifteenth Century and for centuries afterwards, communicated specific information to mostly illiterate viewers.

Second, Dedora explores a more blurred aspect of signing using contemporary imagery of arm, back, and hand gestures that blurs certainty, providing little outside reference, depriving viewers of any interpretive framework to solidify an interpretation other than what they bring to the images themselves.