Deanna Dikeman

(American, b.1954; resides in Columbia, MO)

In the Wardrobe series, Deanna Dikeman ponders both the stories clothes can tell and the affluence of a culture that can afford to discard these worn but perfectly functional articles in favor of new trends and fashions. For this series Dikeman shoots at The Wardrobe, a charity thrift shop she herself has patronized for years, and then arranges her photographs, usually side by side in long horizontal panoramas, to create juxtapositions that never existed in the store itself. Sometimes her pictures push together rows of furs that never hung next to each other on the racks. At other times the photographs link items that occupied the same general space but not the same time, passing though the store in different months or even different years. The patterns in color and repetitions in texture that Dikeman builds are engaging, a sensuous pleasure, even as they serve to emphasize the sheer volume of apparel given up in order to make room for new things.

Deanna Dikeman was born on April 3, 1954 in Sioux City, Iowa. She received a BS in Biology (1976) and an MS in management (1979) from Purdue University. She is currently an instructor at the University of Missouri and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1986. She has lectured at Wichita State University, KS; the Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR; St. Louis Community College, MO; and at Baylor University, Waco, TX. Her work appears in the collections of the Aaron Siskind Foundation, Princeton University; American Century Corperation; the Center for Creative Photography; the Sprint Corporation; the Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City, MO; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL. She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship in 1996. She has shown her work at San Francisco Camerawork, CA; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Gallery 1401, Philadelphia, PA; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; the Rodgers Gallery, Columbia, MO; the Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA; the Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR; and the Society for Contemporary Photography Gallery, Kansas City, MO, among others.