About the Artist
A video artist and performer, Dominique Zeltzman researches concepts of objectification and power through the metaphor of the container as a social construct. Her work has to do with the stretchy exaggeration of time and sequence, endurance, the peripheral, and the mundane practices that catalogue cycles in our lives. After a 15 year career as a choreographer and performer in San Francisco she returned to Baltimore where she received her MFA in Imaging and Digital Art from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She was a 2019 Baker Awards Finalist and a 2015 Baker Artist b-grant awardee, a 2016 MSAC Individual Artist Award recipient, and a 2016 Trawick Prize finalist. She maintains a cross country painting/drawing mail art collaboration and teaches video, photography, and art appreciation at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Dominique Zeltzman website View Website
Artist's Statement
Containment, Duration, Domesticity, and Surveillance.
As a performer and visual artist, my interest in mapping everyday moments through video and installation, evolved from mapping everyday movements through choreography and video. I research the concepts of objectification and power through the metaphor of the container as a social construct.
The container is both a form of oppression and a set of borders we create for ourselves. Like a good parent, such an enclosure functions as a tether that allows one to wander but not stray. Every faux-brick cardboard block that friends and I used to make up the cities that snaked across our nursery school floor was a model for each of our personas: for taxonomies of class, race, religion, sexual orientation, education, political affiliation, and citizenship; and for practices of border control and punishment. By creating such classifications and parameters, we make sense of what would otherwise be chaos. Through sequestration, we at once imprison and protect, for there is safety in isolation.
My work has to do with the stretchy exaggeration of time and sequence, duration, endurance, a daily litany of warnings and instructions, and the mundane practices that catalogue cycles in our lives. It looks at how different vessels and facades might capture a story or be a placeholder for the past. It is a series of incomplete, weird and fragmentary narratives, strange little histories in and of themselves. The pieces involve discomfort, vulgarity, precariousness, and the unadorned. Clunkiness is interesting. So are danger, monotony, boredom, dementia, a wasted body, leaving, ghosts, tight spaces, dirty dishes, a ladder, grime, a toilet, a sink, a stove, heels, ass, a building, a door, people, cars, my bathroom, my bedroom, a skirt, stockings, a street, the fetal position, crawling, walking, creeping, squatting, the shell, balance, and my kitchen.
Extended duration in art provides an opportunity to meditate, slow down, and allow our thoughts to flow unnoticed and move beyond boredom. My endurance-oriented pieces exploit time and space, simultaneously commenting on and confronting the viewer with the psychodynamics of getting through daily life. The story, if there is one, does not dominate, but shapes one’s experience just as a passing spectator, a moving car, or a whistling teakettle might, if given attention.
My house is my studio, a radical place to make art. Like all domestic interiors, the home is rarely represented in history, which usually happens outside—not in the quiet, claustrophobic spaces where the female form tries to shape itself, the body remembering things in sensual and physical ways not easily conveyed with the written word.
