Dominique Duroseau was born in Chicago and raised primarily in Haiti. Duroseau’s work has been exhibited in the Dumbo Arts Festival and Bushwick Open Studios, Brooklyn, NY; Harlem Art Walking Tour, New York, NY; Nave Gallery, Somerville, MA; Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; and forthcoming in “Power, Protest, and Resistance” for Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation at Skylight Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Duroseau earned an Architectural degree from the New Jersey School of Architecture and a Fine Arts degree from Kean University.
Not every social issue should be boiled down to a buzz-word, simply to catch attention. We live in a time of media distractions that trend then reduce many social issues to white noise.
Dominique Duroseau has created a series of narratives which document our time, her own timeline, demonstrating our constant striving within today’s society. Taking into account culture, language, and social aspects, Dominique’s work depicts our contemporary struggles. Favoring more everyday matter as materials — repurposed goods, found objects, “clean trash” — She transforms our social dilemmas into abstracted imagery that reflects our long-growing list of struggles, and distill them into art. Through this multi-media approach, Duroseau has translated her observations into a series of works which are conceptual while representational, architectural yet abstract. Dominique uses sculpture, video performance, photography, printmaking, text and site-specific installations to devise a visual language representing the black sub-culture; these are victims of cultural indifference, coded vernacular, entrenched economic dispositions, and many more such issues.
In this series, Duroseau analyzes the etymology of the Haitian Creole word “nèg” — French spelling “nègre”, rooted in the Latin term for “black” — which has a number of racially-charged permutations across different languages, most notably the word “Nigger.” Through juxtaposition, translation, contextual placement, and other techniques, Dominique is creating analytical platforms where observers should question the historical complexities of a word and its continued presence in advertisements and media.