Exploring the Self, an Interview Between Dominique Rey and Riva Symko

RS: For a long time you’ve been pushing the boundaries of the medium of photography, which is steeped in the politics of representation. You’ve been using sculpture, performance, collage, but you still refer to yourself as a photographer. What is it that you find so compelling about lens-based practices specifically?

DR: I don’t know that I actually refer to myself as a photographer. Though I would agree that photography is the primary medium that I utilize. But it always starts in the body. Even my more abstract collages allude to the corporeal. The camera is the conduit for recording the performance of the body.

Sometimes the photographic image, or the camera itself, become the means for collaging and abstracting the body. I think it comes from my concern with the materiality of the photographic image. Its potency, and how that encounter with the body has so much power. The sculptures, which derive from the collages, are for me human-scale photographic objects that oscillate between massive bodies and thin shards of form, the interplay of image and object.

The material of acrylic has been something that I’ve been experimenting with throughout the sculptural work I’ve done. Sometimes I’ve adhered photographs to the acrylic, sometimes left the acrylic as is. It’s a highly reflective material. It reflects itself, the space and the works around it, as well as the viewer, creating a collage within itself. This happens in unexpected ways that are outside of my control as the artist. In this there is an infinite possibility of transformation.

RS: Using the body, you have been examining ideas specifically of balance, imbalance, push, pull, merge, emerge. Can you talk a bit about how you came to those ideas?

In sculpture, the notion of balance and imbalance, has always been important and specifically to this project, it speaks to the relentless balance/imbalance that is at stake during the early developmental stages of motherhood. My collages and assemblages are by nature, precarious. They find equilibrium but it is a finite place.
-Dominique Rey

RS: They’re unstable.

DR: Everything is constantly changing. There are times when life can feel chaotic and out of control. And other moments, where all the disparate parts that make up one’s life coalesce, what feels like a moment outside of time. I’m interested in the co-existence of these extremes, and the gamut of experiences that reside within this continuum.

RS: Knowing that the work started from your own quotidian experiences as a mother, at what point did you start to incorporate the other parents into your photographs and collages? I’m thinking about works like Going Under (2017), for example.

DR: That first phase…was like a sketch between my child and I. Then my instinct was to work with other people because at the time I didn’t think I wanted this to exist as a portrait of my children and myself/ the artist. I thought it would be interesting to see other parents and children engage one another through movement and play.

Ultimately, there was a certain movement-based performance that I was after that was so clear in my mind that it did become important for me to try that out with my children through improvisation, dance, wrestling.

RS: …it looks like play, it looks like disciplining.

DR: …it can be all of those things. The project really began in a more substantive way with these other families, then it veered back to a deep dive into performing with my children. I really had a very specific image going into the performances regarding how the image was going to be framed, the lighting, the environment, what we would be dressed in.

However, that is always the end of the control because now that I’m working and collaborating with both of my kids, it’s completely out of my hands. I’m not under any kind of illusion that I’m going to direct them. I realized early on that was foolhardy and it wasn’t even interesting – if they were to engage in this process – they needed to set the tone and cadence. I liked the lack of control because for one thing, that was more like reality. It also speaks to where their minds were at. If this was going to be fun and if it was going to be true or have authenticity, they would have to be the directors. Simply by their nature, they invited chance and unpredictability. I’ve endeavored to honour that essence in the process of making the works, and collage is well suited to that framework.

RS: When I think about the exhibition as a whole, it’s almost as though the works take on a very distinct evolution of medium. This may not be the case, but it looks like the mediums progress from performance to photograph to collage to sculpture. Can you explain what the process actually is?

DR: There’s translation and back and forth between mediums. In works like Confluence (2019) – through the background environment, through the strange costumes that we were wearing, confusing figure/ground – the photograph itself, without further manipulation, embodies the qualities and notions that are important. Whereas in others, I feel like this is just the starting point but I can see its potential for material exploration, for collage.

Often I’ll just be in the studio with multiple prints cut up and all kinds of processes ensue. Sometimes it is through material exploration, other times, though less so, the project or the piece starts as a digital collage. In that case, a digital collage might get reprinted at different moments of its evolution. Then using those individual prints, I again cut up, re-layer, shift things again, then sometimes re-photograph. It’s in the process of that re-photographing, using strobes to cast shadows, that the final work usually emerges. Though actually I keep manipulating even after that – there could be no end in sight!

RS: Where does the video fit into this process?

DR: It’s really the culmination of this whole project.

RS: It’s almost like the beginning and the end.

DR: And there’s no doubt that the nature of time-based media is impactful. How it captivates our senses and by-passes defenses that would otherwise be in place.

The video really brings to life and makes tangible this (meta)physical connection between mother and child. I think there are foreboding and dark elements to certain passages, but at the same time, there’s always an underlying core. That no matter what, even in moments of instability or, stress, the sense that life is magic.

RS: Like birth and life…and art-making.