Dominique Rey presents: MOTHERGROUND

Dominique Rey. MOTHERGROUND, 2022. Archival pigment print, 59″x78″.

It is the first show of this scale to deal with themes of motherhood implicitly and explicitly, from the point of view of a mother artist. From agony to ecstasy!

This exhibition has been a long time in the making and has been a collaboration between Rey and WAG-Qaumajuq Head of Collections & Exhibitions, Riva Symko.

MOTHERGROUND reflects Rey’s artistic practice – which spans photography, video, and sculpture – in parallel with fertility and maternity as forms of creative labour. Created with her two children, Madeleine and Auguste Coar, the performative images of MOTHERGROUND explore ideas of presence and absence, attachment and desire, blurring the corporeal and psychic edges that link mother and child.

In the catalogue, contributor Susan Bright highlights several works in the exhibition, read the excerpt below and pick up your copy in ShopWAG this month.

In the video piece MOTHERGROUND (2024), Rey appears gigantesque and abstract in a stripey red and white costume that is organic in shape. It is just one scenario from a selection of performances that Rey and her children act out when dressed in the same costume, both in her video and in her photographic work. She wrestles and writhes with her children – their identical costumes echoed in the fabric they play with and lie on. The effect is that it is hard to differentiate between body and film set. The flowing fabric is reminiscent of the fun of making the bed with a small child as they wonder at the sheet wafting over their head like a parachute, or, on a more mundane level, fighting with a duvet cover on wash day. The video has the power to inspire both wonder and questioning in a presentation of truths wrapped in a fantastical and oblique rendering of experience. She is both part of her children, the environment in which they live, but also separate from them.

Join us for a public opening celebration on October 11, including remarks from Dominique Rey, curator Riva Symko, and other special guests, plus enjoy live music by Kelly Bado and a cash bar.

Meet the Artist

Dominique Rey

Dominique Rey is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, video, performance, collage, and sculpture. Her work delves into peripheral subjectivities, from individuals and groups of people on the margins of dominant culture, to performance-based works that mine the terrain of the unconscious. She is interested in examining the outsider within society, as well as a deep sense of being we have of being strangers to ourselves. For this reason, she utilizes modes of fragmentation to explore the construction of self, as it relates to current experiences of dislocation and disorientation. Throughout her work there is “the tension of being outside one’s own desires, a palpable absence of certainty and longing for connection – both from within and without” (Sandra Fraser).

Her recent work focuses on practices of recontextualization and translation. One form this takes is in the creation of collages derived from her photographic archives that are then re-interpreted into large-scale sculptures that she considers photographic objects. The play of two dimensions within a three-dimensional space is an important facet of this work and forms the basis of her formal investigations. She is interested in pushing the boundary between photography and sculpture, reinvigorating ideas of surface, materiality, and illusion.