L’eau souillée est devenue poussière bleue sous les rayons du soleil

Curator: Jean-Michel Quirion

Through the exhibition L'eau souillée est devenue poussière bleue sous les rayons du soleil, Dominique Sirois summons the mythological tale of Danae, which she declines in various female avatars inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, a sort of ready-to-wear body fragments.

The double corpus, inspired by cryptic stories, refers to different plant seeds (over)used for their pigments, notably indigo (denim blue) and safflower (ascetic tunics). The latter is divided, according to these dyes, into two interstices at the same at DRAC.

Indigo blue, the predominant colour of the enamelled works of the series La femme de Nîmes (2021-2022) arranged in the first space charged with a working-class genesis, has tinted the past of colonialism and, moreover, of capitalism and consumerism. Symbol of slave exploitation, of the extraction of the indigo tree to mass-produce the pigment and of the (over)planting of a cotton monoculture, the blue - denim - acted as a filter to the reading of the eco-econo-ethical-historical-mythical-social references of the present exhibition. A true emblematic commodity of the 1960s popular culture, as well as of sexual emancipation - to the point of hypersexualization -, of class liberation and of the rebellions of identity markers - of gender - during the following decade, jeans still raises important issues today.

In the subsequent saffron-coloured scenography, Sirois' most recent ceramic set, La Femme chenille (2021-2022), laid out on yoga mats, weaves in pieces by artist-activist kimura byol lemoine, including an impressive collection of seeds. Form and function enter into tension. Inside this simulated sanctuary, a spiritual dimension is woven in between the stranglehold of Monsanto-style capitalism and the principle of the ecofeminist.

Among this deregulated diptych, the solar energy pursues a trajectory as a carnal force.

Emmanuelle Leblond, (2022). Dominique Sirois présente une exposition exclusive à DRAC, L’Express. [online].

Une exposition solo de l'artiste Dominique Sirois, (October 21st, 2022), NousTV Drummondville, YouTube, Published by NousTV. [online].

Dominique Sirois, L'eau souillée est devenue poussière bleue sous les rayons du soleil, Manel Benchabane, (2023). Espace #134 Porn-O. [online].