Nathalie Daoust

Impersonating Mao is concerned with uncovering the alternate life of Zhang, an impersonator who assumes the appearance and bearing of Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. Captivated by his quest for self-escapism and his embodiment of one of China’s most iconic historical figures, Daoust’s portraits extract an activity that goes beyond parody to reveal the impersonators desire to flee reality and pay personal homage to a by gone era.

Spending several months in the Alpha Inn, one of the largest S&M “love hotels” in Japan, Daoust photographed 39 dominatrix’ in their private rooms. Lifting the curtain on this illusive fantasy world, Daoust was fortunate to gain access to photograph the Hotel and the girls that offer their unique services to an elite clientele. The result is a series of portraits that delve beyond taboos unveiling a universal human desire to escape reality, creating alternate worlds that oscillate between fantasy, truth and perversion.

This series of delicately hand-coloured B&W pinhole photographs demonstrate the sense of immanence, sublime beauty and alienation that the perpetual landscape of the Swiss Alps provoked in the photographer. The narrative that evolves throughout work is a personal one, a journey steep in nostalgia; here memory and introspection create a web of mystery and illusion. Offset by the whitewashed landscape, luminescent figures appear in awkward and unexpected places, Daoust’s subjects are frozen in time, caught in a territory where dream and reality collide.

In Street Kiss, Daoust has captured the living and working conditions of the female sex workers of the Nicacio brothel in Rio de Janeiro. The Nicacio is both a place of the quick, downmarket sex trade and a space decorated by artists; the girls who work there have also founded a fashion label, Daspu, to fund workers benefits for prostitutes. Here, the artist reveals, unflinchingly and without judgment, the reality of this daily life; hidden under thick makeup, the portraits reveal the elderly age of some of the working prostitutes who cannot afford to retire due and so must continue to ply their trade. The photographic work of Street Kiss delivers a world of sex, ambiguity and entrapment; capturing the fragments of seduction that drift in-between lost worlds.

Focusing on the construction of female identity, Entre Quatre Murs, Berlin is a series of compositions of women and space.  This sequence of three-dimensional portraits transparentizes the female body, as Daoust interweaves her subjects with their surroundings until the distinction between self and environment all but disappears.  Each scene seems a microcosmic snapshot of the mind, as the bounds between these women's external world and interior self dissolves.
Each image is a composite, the elements separated and printed on layers of transparent orthochromatic film.  By superimposing these layers, the image is reconstituted 3-dimensionally.

Tokyo Girls is an animation-like picture series, capturing 30 women from around the world, united in Japan to perform striptease. For this project each woman is displayed through lenticular technology; a technique that gives still images the illusion of animated life. As the viewer moves around the gallery, the women dance, vamp and primp, caught in a perpetual loop of seduction and solicitation.

The beauty of Nathalie Daoust's art is on full display in this her first book, a document of the Carlton Arms Hotel, an underground New York City legend where every room is decorated by artists from all over the world. Her style is a photography that eschews reality for image manipulation, with highly stylized settings, props and costumes, using different film speeds and exposures, and a variety of people, all soaked in gorgeous dreamland colors. Step inside this book and you step inside various visions. The sensual, visual language will have you hallucinating the felt-experience of a hotel/work-of-art.

 - Mike Tyler -