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Indepth Arts News:
"Dominique Rey: Selling Venus"
2005-04-01 until 2005-05-15
Plug In, ICA
Winnipeg, MB,
CA Canada
Throughout her artistic practice, Dominique Rey has focused on issues surrounding female identity and sexuality. She has been fascinated particularly with the moment a woman’s gaze is self-directed even as she prepares herself for the scrutiny of others. By exploring this process of self-reflective looking, Rey reverses, displaces and creates the gaze anew.
Selling Venus/Vénus au miroir presents portraits of exotic dancers, and of the artist herself, at the Crazy Horse dance club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Rey uncovers illusions and stereotypes about a sub-culture of women in extreme feminine roles, and re-opens the debate on the victimization of women in oppressive and exploitive environments. Photographed in the intimacy of their dressing room, the dancers’ process of self-transformation becomes an extension of the performative act. It is a process that most women enact every day. The video installation further highlights the duality between the private persona and the public mask, bringing into play notions of physical beauty, narcissism, and the passage to self-acceptance.
Dominique Rey graduated with a BFA Honours Degree from the University of Manitoba in 1999 and later studied at the Yale Summer School program in Norfolk. She is currently completing her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York. Her work has been shown across Canada including solo exhibitions at Gallery One One One and the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain in Winnipeg. In 2003 she was in the group exhibition, Young Winnipeg Artists at Plug In ICA and Another Other, a group exhibition at Gallery Neubacher in Toronto curated by Paul Butler. She has been awarded several grants from the Manitoba Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Border Crossings, the Winnipeg Free Press, ETC Montreal, and the Globe and Mail.
A project of Plug In ICA and La Maison des artistes, this exhibition is divided between the two locations. Please visit La maison at 219 Provencher Boulevard. The exhibition catalogue will be available in May 2005.
With the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Winnipeg Arts Council and the WH and SE Loewen Foundation. This exhibition is also sponsored by Johnson Industrial Plastics Ltd., Speedy Glass, Future Tint & Stripe and Contempra Signs. The artist would like to thank the VideoPool Media Production Fund.
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