My practice has a focus on nostalgia for time and place, its associated idealism, melancholy beauty and bittersweet impossibility. Employing a range of symbolic elements, both personally relevant and picked at random, I create ambiguity-filled collage-like compositions that attempt to emulate the erratic and senseless nature of dreams, and the reimagined histories they present to us, like tableaux of a memory cache.
The works in Roadtrip form part of an ongoing series. Ideas of dreams and memory, travel and stillness are explored as imagined vinyl album cover artworks. I grew up surrounded by the images and long songs of the progressive rock era, thanks to my dad’s love of the genre. As a result, I developed a strange nostalgia for this time in history of seemingly unbridled creativity, despite not having lived it myself. I am interested in both real and unreal memory, and how over-romanticisation of the past, while tantamount to folly, has perennial appeal. In the common square format of vinyl cover sleeves, I found an ideal template on which to examine these ideas, and give new permanence to something of lessening ubiquity. My works - similar in scale and style - are a nod to these surreal album cover artworks.
Throughout this series, islands and floating rock fragments exist just out of reach, flowers and other organic objects become symbols of past narratives, while objects melt into others, referencing the dreaming subconscious. The vinyl cover format and borrowing of real-world album cover design pull the ethereal themes back to human culture, while the lack of accompanying music lend them a vagueness, like an obscure, suspended historicity.
Dominique Merven
Dominique Merven is a Sydney-based Australian artist engaged with drawing and painting to explore ideas of nostalgia, dreams and memory. She holds a Master of Art majoring in drawing from UNSW Art & Design, and has spent time in Tel Aviv where she was selected to join Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design's MFA program for one semester. She has been a finalist in the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize and her work is held in the Macquarie Group collection and private collections in Australia.
Installation images by Docqment
Dominique Merven
32 Alta Cienega 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
4:15 Hokkaido 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache, gold leaf on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Blue Void 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Dream in Tangerine 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache, gold leaf on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Rain in Green 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Return Ticket 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Rose Cumulus 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Rue Sainte Thérèse 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Sunset Over Dante's View 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
The Other Side 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
Turbine Dusk 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
Dominique Merven
What's Lost 2021
coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper
31 × 31 cm
