Dominique Paul “Unnatural Selections”
MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects
This event has ended.
Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery presents Unnatural Selections, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Dominique Paul.
Using photographs and video work, Dominique Paul journeys through a plausible near future where humans and animals adapt to survive. Unnatural Selections derives from three projects the artist undertook between 2010 and 2013: The Insects of Surinam, Migrations of the Arthropods and Prometheus.
For The Insects of Surinam (2011-13), Paul combines contemporary magazine cutouts of male bodies with delicate Baroque-era illustrations of tropical plants and insects by Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Merian was a female naturalist who traveled to Surinam in South America in 1699 and became a pioneer in the study of the metamorphosis of insects. The two image sources, from widely different moments in time and space, are deceptively harmonized by the reflection of light through plastic and glass containers. The resulting imagery slyly comments on controversial genetic engineering in an era of increasingly endangered species.
Global warming is the subject of Migrations of the Arthropods, Paul’s 2012 photo and video work in which wearable structures are created using recycled plastic bottles to affect a transformation from human to insect, thus re-envisioning Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an evolutionary survival mechanism.
In the photo series Prometheus (2010-2011), Paul questions human consciousness. A shamanistic figure wearing luminous headgear seems to channel the spirits of stuffed animals in what appears to be a natural history museum.
The artist performs and employs projection, collage, lighting and other techniques as well as designs costumes and props to construct her multi-layered imagery.
Dominique Paul (b. 1967) lives and works in New York (USA) and Montreal (Canada) where she received a Doctorate in the Study and Practice of Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada (2009). Paul’s thesis titled “Entre chair et lumière: actualité de la photographie” is to be published by Art Le Sabord Editions in 2014. She has an MFA from UNSW, Sidney, Australia. Her work has been shown throughout Canada, the United States, France, China and Japan, and is featured extensively in European and North American Publications. In 2012, Paul was awarded an artist in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) on Governors Island where the series Migrations of the Arthropods was created. Paul has received generous support from: Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Conseil des Arts de Longueuil, Société de Développement des Entreprises Culturelles du Québec, and the Québec Government Office in New York.
[Image: DOMINIQUE PAUL “The Insects of Surinam 19 (detail)” (2013) Chromogenic print on Hahnemuhle cotton paper, 30 x 23 inches / 76 x 58,5 cm. ]
Media
Schedule
from December 12, 2013 to January 18, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-12-12 from 18:00 to 20:00