page_title: Nathalie Daoust
section_title: Projects
hierarchical_section_title: Nathalie Daoust / Projects
caption_attribution_description: English: New York Hotel Story, USA
context_page_description: Nathalie Daoust is a Canadian photographer and contemporary artist. Using space and light as avenues through which to examine the creation of self, she constructs worlds that lay bare the conflicting impulses that drive us.
context_section_description: New York Hotel Story
  In 1997 Daoust was invited to decorate a room in the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York City – a hotel that, for the past 40 years, has invited artists such as Banksy, Andre Charles and Paco Simone to transform its rooms and walls. Daoust created a ‘childhood dreamland’ crowded with games and plush animals and fully painted in Crayola-bright colours. After completing her room, Daoust was inspired to live in the Carlton Arms Hotel, intending to explore it photographically. For the following two years, she stayed alternately in every room to absorb each artist’s singular universe. The resultant images explore the interaction between subject and closed environment, engaging with the uncertainty of self as each room becomes a microcosmic world.
  These photos were published in a book of the same name in 2002.
  Tokyo Girls
  Tokyo Girls is an animation-like picture series capturing 30 women from around the world, united in Japan to perform striptease. Photographed using lenticular technology – a technique that imparts the illusion of movement – the women seem to dance, vamp and primp in front of our eyes, caught in a perpetual loop of seduction and solicitation. While their fate could seem melancholy, the dancers have a certain light-hearted frivolity, epitomized by the woman who winks coyly at us while performing her dance. 
  Despite sharing the same occupation, each portrait represents a unique individual. Photographed against a white backdrop, the women are able to tell their own stories by communicating via movement and expression. Daoust does not allow them to become stereotypes, but lets them reveal the conscious artifice of their trade.  
  Entre Quatre Murs, Berlin
  Focusing on the construction of female identity, Entre Quatre Murs, Berlin, is a series of compositions involving women and space. Each image is a composite of elements, separated from the original photograph and printed on layers of transparent orthochromatic film. By superimposing these layers, the image is reconstituted three-dimensionally.
  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 almost disappears. By dissolving these confines dividing external and interior, the scenes reflect and suggest a microcosmic snapshot of the mind. 
  Street Kiss, Brazil
  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.
  As a female photographer Daoust disrupts the exchange between subject and traditional viewer, allowing these women to exist not as passive objects of the male gaze but as active participants in the creation of their gendered identity.  In this way the women, the art, and the fight for dignity in life all come together.
  Frozen in Time, Switzerland
  Set in an ambiguous territory where dream and reality clash, this series of hand painted black and white pinhole images juxtaposes the idyllic scenery of the Swiss Alps with stiff female bodies, their figures as haphazardly positioned as discarded dolls.  These unidentified women are purposefully left ambiguous, evoking a universal sense of loss and disequilibrium.  In this altered state of reality, stillness and silence permeate each image.  It is an almost post-apocalyptic quiet, the landscape punctuated with the man-made elements, crumbling monuments for a disappearing world.
  Tokyo Hotel Story
  Tokyo Hotel Story continues Daoust's exploration of female sexuality and the subversion of gender stereotypes. Over a four-month period Daoust engaged with the dominatrices at one of Tokyo’s premier S&M love hotels, the Alpha-In.  She photographed 39 women in their private rooms, surrounded by their equipment and dressed in the regalia that define their trade. This work takes the viewer b
caption: New York Hotel Story, USA
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