Dominique Duroseau’s Experience Without Disdain Opens March 5
(Delaware and Chester Counties, PA • February 20, 2018)—Experience Without Disdain, a visual arts exhibition featuring the work of Dominique Duroseau, opens on March 5 in Delaware County Community College’s Art Gallery (Room 2305, 901 S. Media Line Road, Media, PA). Duroseau will give an artist talk on Wednesday, March 28 beginning at 4 p.m. in the Large Auditorium. The exhibition is on view through April 6, and is free and open to the public.
Experience Without Disdain considers how fear of black bodies shapes their representation within contemporary visual culture. Employing photographic portraiture as a system of documentation, Duroseau examines how American culture categorizes certain skin tones as more dangerous, and subsequently more suspicious, less hirable, and more likely to encounter harassment. Displayed alongside Duroseau’s works of sculpture, graphic design, texts, and animations, this material constructs a narrative in which black subjects reclaim agency typically denied to them. Duroseau is especially concerned with questions of language, mannerisms, social issues, and injustice—themes that link the exhibition to the College’s 2017-18 College-Wide Reading book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson's memoir explores the brokenness of the criminal justice system through the author's firsthand account of defending vulnerable death-row inmates in Alabama. Experience Without Disdain creates new dialogues around these issues through Duroseau's multilayered references to both historical and contemporary representations of black bodies.
Duroseau is a Newark-based artist born in Chicago, raised in Haiti. Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her exhibitions, performances, and screenings include SATELLITE ART and PULSE Play in Miami; The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery and Smack Mellon in New York City; Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. She is currently a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn and has received artist residencies from Gallery Aferro and Index Art Center. Duroseau holds an associate degree in Architecture from Essex County Community College, a bachelor’s in Architecture from the New Jersey School of Architecture, and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from Kean University.
For more information about the exhibition, or other arts programming at the College, visit www.dccc.edu/art-gallery or contact Caitlin Flaherty, Gallery Director, at 610-359-5266.
