Winning artist profile: Nathalie Daoust
By Celio Barreto
nathalie daoust
daoustnathalie.com
training
Photography degree at Cegep du Vieux, Montreal
media
35mm analog photography plus hand-printing
artist q&a
What are you presenting here?
My latest project - "Tokyo Hotel Story" - continuing my exploration of female sexuality and subversion of gender stereotypes. I spent several months living in Alpha In, one of the biggest love hotels in Japan, and made intimate portraits of 39 women in hotel rooms, surrounded by the specialist equipment and dressed in the regalia that define their trade. I believe numerous challenges still exist in terms of confronting deep-rooted stereotypes of gender-roles. My work helps me to delve beyond taboos while showing the universal human desire to escape reality and create fantasy worlds that often oscillate between dream, reality and perversion.
Why are you doing what you are doing?
To explore the border between dream and reality and where people go to escape. I also like to push the boundaries of photography through experimental methods, working with new mediums and discovering new techniques in the darkroom.
What are your aspirations?
Since my very first experiments in photography I have been fascinated by human behavior and its various realities, by the ever-present human desire of escaping and living in a dream world. Photography allows me to go deeper into those worlds and to discover different philosophy without judging.
the experts' view
Celio H. Barreto: This artist's works inhabit both the real and the fantasy worlds of lust and desire, pain and pleasure. Daoust's photographs are a complex compositions of elements and references that come together to create single, powerful images. Her use of shallow focus and sepia tones give the final subjects the feel of a historical document. This seems to address the ancient and always-present sexual desires of human beings. The dichotomy between pain and pleasure is evident in the context of each figure and the classical composition of each picture.
Guido Saldaña: The answer to what goes on behind closed doors, the pleasure fest of imagery for the bizzarre voyeur in us all.
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