The Clifton Cultural Arts Center is thrilled to present, after much pandemic-related postponement, Korean Dreams, a project by Nathalie Daoust, on display from February 12 to March 12. Nathalie Daoust is a Canadian photographer, whose work is often concerned with photography’s relationship to fantasy and desire. Photographs within the artist’s oeuvre are characterized by equal parts concealment and revelation, utilizing techniques unique to darkroom photography to both obscure her subject and cement it’s actuality. Korean Dreams consists of a series of monochromatic and almost sepia images, largely figurative but also architectural in subject, that all indicate a narrative that takes place in North Korea, or at least, an outsider’s fantasy therein.

As Samantha Small, an art-writer from New York, describes, “Korean Dreams is a complex series that probes the unsettling vacuity of North Korea. Piercing its veil with her lens, these images reveal a country that seems to exist outside of time, as a carefully choreographed mirage. Daoust has spent much of her career exploring the chimeric world of fantasy: the hidden desires and urges that compel people to dream, to dress up, to move beyond the bounds of convention and to escape from reality. With Korean Dreams she is exploring this escapist impulse not as an individual choice, but as a way of life forced upon an entire nation. Daoust deliberately obscures her photographs during the development stage, as the layers of film are peeled off, the images are stifled until the facts become 'lost' in the process and a sense of detachment from reality is revealed. This darkroom method mimics the way information is transferred in North Korea – the photographs, like the North Korean people, are both manipulated until the underlying truth is all but a blur. The resultant pictures speak to North Korean society, of missing information and concealed truth.

Details on an opening reception and gallery hours are to be determined based on current status of public health crisis. Please stay tuned for future exhibitions coming to CCAC’s gallery and in public. For more information, please visit Cliftonculturalarts.org

Date: February 12 – March 12, 2021

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