Echo: Behind The Design Of Stephen Dean’s New Installation

Call it kismet. Kunsthal KAdE museum in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, was planning “Stairway to…?” its exhibition of ladders and stairs by such artists as Gordon Matta-Clark, M.C. Escher, and Cai Guo-Qiang as Stephen Dean was preparing to mount Crescendo, his 50-foot ladder sculpture, at the Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Denis in Paris in 2023. When KAdE invited Dean to participate in its 2026 show, however, it was for a solo yet related exhibition through the summer at a different site: Elleboogkerk, which happens to be an 18th-century former church (about a ½ mile from the museum). The result is Echo, an installation of five long ladders suspended from rafters beneath Elleboogkerk’s soaring ceiling and fitted with dichroic glass, which, Dean says, “is a material with a perception volatility and optical qualities that have fascinated me for 20 years.” Visitors will be fascinated by the 10 wall and floor projections and hue sequences the glass generates depending on the time of day. “In my sculptures,” adds Paris-born Dean, who describes himself as an art-school dropout that begins each day in his Long Island City, New York, studio painting watercolors, “visual science meets the timeless archetype of the ladder, a universal, fundamentally human symbol across cultures, signaling passage between celestial and terrestrial realms.”