User talk:Karen.irvine

Nathalie Daoust
As recipient of numerous prestigious grants, Canadian award-winning photographer Nathalie Daoust has been able to fund her travels to get up and close with the most intimate and darker aspects of female sexuality and its manifestations, dismantling gender stereotypes and doing away with the limitations of gender biases.

Since the late 90s, when Daoust first broken onto the scene photographing the themed rooms of the Carlton Arms Hotel (NY), which resulted in her first published book (The New York Hotel Story), Daoust has extensively exhibited her work throughout Canada and internationally – in over 20 countries; both in solo and group exhibitions.

Daoust is an artist of visceral vision and unrelenting dedication who, using the almost-extinct traditional method of darkroom film photography in insatiable, inquisitive, and experimental ways, produces a body of work of a corporeal quality unrivalled by the detachment of today’s digital artistry.

Daoust’s photography provides us with an exploration of female sexuality that is not sexploitative and is evocative of the desire for escapism that moves the artist every time and is first registered in the shoot. Her work plays with the dynamic of the public and the private, making room in the otherwise heavily regulated public sphere for the deepest of censorable human emotions pertaining to desire. The forbidden is shown as bursting the seams of the tightly knitted stability of prescribed life, revealing the absurd in the proscribed.

Whether recreating the atmosphere of the beautiful grotesque of love hotels in Tokyo, the calmness of the snow-capped Swiss Alps, the most intimate aspects of the psyche in Berlin, or the taboo of the sex trade in a cheap Brazilian brothel; Daoust’s finely carved art does retain the element of surprise rarely found beyond the spontaneous. The fantasy worlds of Daoust’s ability translate as having escaped staging and in them Daoust manages to do the particular and unique justice: In the artist’s pieces, women retain their subjectivity and agency, their gaze invites us into their world and whispers their secrets into our ears.

Daoust’s art unleashes the monstrous feminine in photographs of dichotomous depth of field and claustrophobic persuasion that convey an aura of oxymoronic secular divinity. Even the fetish, present in most of Daoust’s current work, escapes condemnation: Though its essence is re-enacted time and again in the exhibiting of her catalogue, it is never caged, nor tamed or aimed at our enjoyment. Daoust’s subjects are not there for shock value nor do they perform our fantasies or satisfy our curiosity as perverse sexual rarities paraded in a contemporary version of the bygone freak show. Instead, we are made aware of just how privileged we are to have been allowed to see them played out in front of our very eyes.

Daoust’s techniques successfully sustain the realm of the in-between where we do not contend with the limitations of the real, nor the chaotic nature of dreams but in its place are presented with the factual vagueness of the world as it would be if it just was. As if an illusionist, Daoust is capable of conjuring up a vision of a world without borders, which, prevalent as it is in her work, is evocative of the universal appeal of escapism and transformative in that it invites introspection.

Born in Montreal, where she studied photography between 1994 and 1997 at the Cégep du Vieux, Daoust now resides in Berlin when not traveling for her art projects.

Daoust work has been the subject of many publications and the artist herself has been guest speaker in various radio and TV shows.

Trish Pomar