Di$play_Body
Dominique Sirois
- Exhibition
Di$play_Body presents a continuation of the research of Montreal-based artist Dominique Sirois, who has focused on art and economics in her work since 2014. In resonance with the various iterations of Indice éternité (2016-2017) and Mimesis Trinity (2014-2017), the theme of finance is once again centralized through a combination of affects that conceptually and formally exacerbate the prevailing trends of greed for any miser obsessed with economy. Thus, through possible utopian cessations, economic retentions or mythical speculations, Sirois presents the financial dimension divided into two different allegorical figures. These two representations, or rather, these extensions of financial manifestations, propose opposing attitudes towards money: one that is between retention and donation, or deprivation and permission. Figures made of casts and assemblages, specific to Sirois' iconography, are intriguing, and at the same time, frightening. The practical exploration of ceramics is therefore intertwined in a bidding of both theoretical and anecdotal tracks.
In the first figure, the traits of the previously mentioned miser are intensified through the features of a businesswoman, not far from those of the controversial Martha Stewart, who was accused of insider trading in 2004 and imprisoned that same year. Arranged on a tiled device, the biomorphic body of the latter is dismantled into a somatic and anatomical span. This inert composition presents organic tension; it seems immutable — half natural and half artificial — even transhumanistic.
In the second figure, the mythological figure of Danaë is summoned. According to the age-old Greek myth, Acrisius confines his daughter Danaë to a tower when an oracle predicts that his descendants would kill him. Interestingly, the tower to which Danaë is confined is nonetheless showered with gold sent from Zeus. Sirois appropriates this chimerical dispute in a representation of abundant salvation: a flood of coins. The bare body of Danaë is analogically linked to the nudes of art history, and the Danaë figure painted in a series by Titian (between 1544 and 1560) is seen updated in the current perspectives of fashion and high fashion commercials, including those of Versace. The body thus becomes human support — a device — for luxurious objects.
Transposed in immersive and decorative installation space, the arrangements suggest a metonymic displacement. The paradigm of art for art, at times associated with decoration, is correlated to that of money for money, and as such should the exhibition be apprehended. In this installation, the visitor is invited to experience an assembled interior worthy of a decor magazine; one punctuated with symmetrically arranged pieces, ethereal elements and atypical furniture made with tiles. Armored textile pieces are contrasted with transparent ornamental fabric upon which is printed the traditional white shirt of the businessman, however, dislocated — even jumbled — it might be.
Di$play_Body by Dominique Sirois introduces new formal and conceptual associations of greed, linking the fictional to the decorative in an allegory for money by bodies converted into devices.
— Jean-Michel Quirion
Dominique Sirois lives and works in Montreal, she holds a degree from University of Quebec in Montreal in visual art (MFA 2010) and is pursuing a Ph.D. Her installation work takes the form of sets composed of individual pieces often in the logic of assemblages. They are often sculptural, associating ceramics, casts and found objects. These assemblages have also as a starting point images where Sirois seek to play with the materiality of prints in dialogue with different material supports. With her projects, Sirois creates mental spaces, like semiotic and analogical constructions using economic, aesthetic, archeologic and digital references. Her projects have been presented in numerous galleries in Canada, among them Clark Centre, Division gallery and Latitude 53. Sirois also did several residencies abroad (CCA in Glasgow, Couvent des Récollets in Paris and Hangar in Barcelona). She frequently collaborates with artist Grégory Chatonsky. Together, they presented their joint work at MOCA Taipei, at CDA of Enghien-les-Bains in France, at Mois de la Photo in Montreal, at Unicorn Center for Arts in Beijing and at l'IMAL in Brussels and more recently at Diagonale in Montreal.
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