MOTHERGROUND In Flux

As you walk through the galleries, you’ll see a mix of photography and sculpture depicting the intimate moments between mother and child and the joy, love, and complexities of being a mother and an artist. Towards the back of the exhibition space, you’ll come to a print overtaking the entire back wall, upon closer inspection you’ll see two doors – one for adults and one for children. Step behind the curtain door and you’ll be enveloped into a private world where the title film MOTHERGROUND, plays.

Exhibition curator, Dr. Riva Symko speaks about this portion of the gallery in her catalogue essay, available at ShopWAG:

The last ‘chapter’ of the exhibition is not really a chapter at all. Nor is it an epilogue, coda, or appendix. Rather, the film MOTHERGROUND (2024), situated at the furthest physical corner of the WAG’s triangular gallery space, brings a unique experience to the show and brings the exhibition together.

Children are invited to crawl through their own entrance to the installation using a small opening at the bottom of a gigantic curtain wall carapace enclosing a pulsing red, body-like interior room. The film/video itself was shot in two alternating ‘scenes’ which play to a haunting original score composed by Patrick Kirst.

The first ‘scene’ features Dominique, Madeleine and Auguste dressed in red and white striped bodysuits, laying upon matching red and white striped mats, engaging in their characteristic improvised choreography. The second scene was shot outdoors with Rey and her children dressed in floral suits, rolling, cartwheeling, squirming, piling on top of one another, and at one point even using a long, clear, ice-like pillar to balance and stabilize each other.

Both scenes oscillate between video footage both in colour and in black and white, and footage enhanced by strobing lights and foggy mist. After experiencing the video installation, visitors must then walk back through the first three chapters of the non-linear narrative vertices. There, they review and re-discover Rey’s photographs and sculptures with the new visual and aural information provided by the film still playing in their consciousness.

The film itself is composed in an experiential way that invites all who enter to move with it. To bend, and stretch, and turn ourselves into shapes, to reach for our parents, and to pull ourselves towards our children. To understand ourselves both as independent from, and contingent to, each other.

MOTHERGROUND is the first exhibition of its kind in a Canadian context to thoroughly meditate on the subject of motherhood. Dominique Rey is a Franco-Manitoban, multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, video, performance, collage, and sculpture. Visit MOTHERGROUND, on now until June 28.