Dominique Rey — MOTHERGROUND

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Dominique Rey, “MOTHERGROUND,” video still (courtesy of WAG-Qaumajuq)

Motherhood may be a recurring theme in the history of art, but it has often been relegated to the modest dimensions of serene religious images and sentimental portraits.

A major exhibition at Winnipeg’s largest art institution, MOTHERGROUND works on an epic scale. This ambitious, experimental show by Franco-Manitoban artist Dominique Rey refuses to be relegated. It is on view through Mar. 31, 2025 at WAG-Qaumajuq.

Both rigorously intelligent and profoundly visceral, Rey’s exploration of mothering is shot through with ambiguity and ambivalence. The multidisciplinary artist uses large-scale photographs, photo-collages and life-size 3D objects constructed from acrylic board to represent motherhood as a process of perpetual transformation — of mother, of child, of the bond between them.  

Combining larger cultural constructs around motherhood with her own subjective experience, Rey uses herself and her two small children, Madeleine and Auguste, as performers and subjects. The three are often shown covered with elastic fabric, which can enclose their bodies or reveal them, bind them together or stretch them apart. Amorphous and shifting, these fabric shapes suggest the constant push and pull of the mother-child relationship.  

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Dominique Rey, “Untitled,” 2023, maquette, archival pigment print, full scale 94" (courtesy of WAG-Qaumajuq)

The show, which is divided into three main “chapters,” takes its title partly from the figure/ground categories of visual analysis, and many of the works possess an abstract beauty, with faces left unseen and bodies and backgrounds pared down to a back-and-forth of line, form and colour. 

But Rey is also referencing the maternal body as the ground from which the child emerges, a physical and psychological dynamic expressed through images that sometimes read like a scene from a horror movie, sometimes like a slapstick-comedy gag.

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Dominique Rey, “Climat propice,” 2022, archival pigment print, 48" x 36" (courtesy of WAG-Qaumajuq)

The first chapter, In Case of Storms, takes photographs of mother and child and fills in Rey’s outline with images of Winnipeg river ice, cool and grey. This silhouette can read as a presence or a slightly spooky absence, but it’s a form against which Madeleine reacts naturally, as children do, sometimes reaching out, sometimes breaking away. 

The second chapter, Domestic Frieze, features large-scale photo-collages that vibrate between radical fragmentation and striking visual unity. Images of mother and children are cut and pasted into dynamic, baroque spirals of undifferentiated arms and legs, overlaid with shapes of black and white. There are glimpses of quotidian domestic chaos in the background, but these big-impact pieces are also abstracted to the point where they can be intriguingly hard to read. Does this tangle of reaching limbs and bent-over backs express the joyful relief of a mother-child reunion or the physical exhaustion of meeting constant toddler demands? (And, yes, the answer could depend on the viewer.)

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Dominique Rey, “MOTHERGROUND,” video still (courtesy of WAG-Qaumajuq)

Bildungsroman, the third chapter, moves beyond what curator Riva Symko calls the “black-box studio setting” of Rey’s studio. Markers of individuality and palpable signs of our current place and time — Adidas sneakers and boreal forests and suburban parks — make their way into the images, as the child ventures into a larger world.  

With all these works, psychological theories about attachment and individuation, nature and nurture, hover nearby. The final effect of MOTHERGROUND, however, is deeply emotional, even physical.  

That deep undertow of feeling finds its culminating expression in a video installation that brings together the themes of the three previous gallery rooms. Parting plush curtains — there’s one large entrance for adults, one small ground-level entrance for children — viewers enter a dark, enveloping, womb-like room. On a large screen is a playful, dreamy performance by the artist and her children. Moving to an evocative score by Patrick Kirst, they morph from one undifferentiated organic mass into complex configurations of independence and interconnection.

In decades past, women were often told that art and motherhood were incompatible. In MOTHERGROUND, creative work and maternal labour merge, to extraordinary effect. ■

Dominique Rey, with Madeleine and Auguste Coar, MOTHERGROUND, is on view through Mar. 31, 2025 at WAG-Qaumajuq in Winnipeg

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