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Dominique Blain

(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Dominique Blain, Table des matières (2003)
Dominique Blain lives and works in Montreal. Her work has been showed in several cities in North America, Europe and Australia. Three major retrospective of her work has been organised: in Montreal, Regina and Calgary (2004); in Quebec City, San Francisco and Rome (1998); in Bristol, Belfast, London, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Cambridge (1997-98). Many museums has showed her work: Portland Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kunstverein in Frankfurt; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen; European Museum in Brussels; and Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

Avoiding the trap of the didacticism often linked with political art, Blain explores themes of war, racism, slavery, mass indoctrination of children and adults, and other relationships of domination. Using archival photographs and found objects in ways that release them from the torpor provoked by the proliferation of images in our world, the artist rekindles meanings in her materials and uncovers their underlying ideological resonances.

She uses various modes of expression, such as photography, montage, installation and sculpture, to deploy a visual rhetoric that has an uncanny rapport with the strategies of the advertising world. Her critical re-reading of images and objects gives us works which "...simultaneously seduce and disturb our gaze... forcing us to come to grips with our humanity and ethics." (1)

Jacques Perron © 2000 rev. 2012 FDL

(1) Louise Déry