Artist Dominique Rey makes case motherhood a catalyst for creativity

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This article was published 21/12/2024 (581 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS

Domestic Frieze 03, a large-scale archival pigment print, is part of Franco-Manitoban artist Dominique Rey’s solo exhibition MOTHERGROUND, now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

In historical terms, friezes were long panels of sculpture or painting that usually depicted big subjects — heroic battles, civic processions, religious scenes. Here a series of linked photomontages stretching across one of WAG-Qaumajuq’s gallery walls suggests this format, but Rey uses it to call up the everyday back-and-forth of the mother-child relationship.

There’s something subversive about applying heroic form and scale to domestic life, a theme that has so often been marginalized or dismissed as not worthy of serious artistic consideration. Rey’s ambitious, experimental project insists on taking up space.

Rey uses herself as subject, in collaboration with her children. Starting with pictures of mother and child, she cuts, pastes and reconfigures them into a rhythmic and repetitive pattern of black and white, presence and absence. Mother and child are seen as perpetually merging, then separating, within a final image that is simultaneously figurative and abstract.

By fragmenting the images of mother and child, Rey rigorously cuts through the sentimentality and idealization that have historically surrounded the representation of motherhood in art. She offers something more bracing, ambiguous and ambivalent. Is this intense mother-child dance an expression of utter joy or complete exhaustion or — as with so many aspects of parenting — a bit of both?

WHY IT MATTERS

English literary critic Cyril Connolly once wrote, “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway,” a warning that family life was seemingly incompatible with creative life.

This notion has been particularly damaging for women, with art and motherhood often being defined as two all-encompassing callings that couldn’t possibly overlap.

In the 19th century, this belief was often propped up by pseudoscience around women’s brains and wombs, but these ideas have persisted, in different ways, into our own era. In a 2014 interview that set off a firestorm of commentary, British artist Tracey Emin suggested that for her, at least, art and motherhood were irreconcilable. “There are good artists that have children. Of course, there are,” she said. “They are called men.”

Rey is not universalizing in MOTHERGROUND, which is a profoundly personal project. But she makes a sharp subjective case that artmaking and parenting don’t have to be antithetical. In fact, as the works in the show demonstrate, the freestyling chaos, the sense of play, the deep awareness of physical and emotional vulnerability that come with motherhood can become catalysts for creativity.

In Rey’s astonishing work, maternal labour and artistic labour fuse together. As with the intermingled forms of Domestic Frieze 03, it becomes impossible to sort out where one starts and the other ends.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca