Anca Potera?u Gallery, Bucharest

26 Popa Soare Street, 023983, sector 2 Romania

Fri 14 Feb 2020 to Wed 15 Apr 2020

PR: Megan Dominescu’s textile works reference a local visual landscape flooded with imageries of sex, video-chat rooms and erotic massage parlors. The apparent nuances of the adult industry categories fade from one image to another, as her commentary focuses on the gaze that is drawn in by the fliers and the posters that she sees scattered all around Bucharest. The artist plays with the seductive force of kitsch and sexual promises with little interest towards the object or the subject of the gaze – what is enticing about Megan Dominescu’s works is her raw sense of humor that becomes at once grotesque and playful making obvious the crudeness and pervasiveness of our reality.

Dear Megan,

Ever since we met I wanted to ask you how you started being taken by this frenzy of rug hooking. Your works caught my eye immediately – nudity, exposure, insistent invitations to have a good time.

Are these textile works a social critique of the commodification of sex? Are you laugh- ing at those laughing at those laughing at ourselves?

You are translating something that attracts the eye at the same time that it would rather turn away, oddly domesticating both tendencies. If in the Abduction from the Seraglio the lovers save each-other, who saves your characters? Do they need saving at all?

“100% real” – I can touch your images – some feel a bit rough around the edges, freshly glued and carrying that astringent smell of silicone. I could not keep them in the office and as you started bringing them in, I had to hide them on the hallways. Enter the dolls. What a scare they gave me a couple of drowsy mornings, their bodies weighing idly by, but actively work- ing a presence around their human-like size.

I wonder, why is Iorgu the tyrant of the abyss, the aggressor? His arms are soft, a bundle of wool you made of him. Do your carpets ever come apart?

Your works are fluffy, but sometimes you want precision. There is a coarse texture around the letters that form the uncanny phrases on your rugs: Ms. Exclusivity, Scan here, Confidential and Horny Girls… Breasts are exacerbated by green and red nipples complemented by grinning mouths and hungry-eyed faces that seem to would rather consume than embrace.

You are so focused on how we look at things that want to be looked at with disregard.

There is a screen of a screen in your rug hooking, fetishized and labored. The “Octopussy” work sends me thinking of all that hentai that we pirated as teenagers, secretly exchanging CDs and internet links to Toon Sex or something of that nature. Back then they seemed new and surprising, perhaps enticing and surely foreign – how calmly and benign our visual reality sets in.

Dear Megan,
See you at the opening,
C.

Megan Dominescu (b. 1997) is a visual artist, living and working in Bucharest, Romania. She graduated from the Department of Painting at the National University of the Arts, Bucharest in 2018. Born in the Netherlands to Romanian and American parents, Megan grew up in Washington, D.C. and later moved to Bucharest, Romania. Megan’s clashing background is a strong inspiration in her practice. Using humor as a weapon, Megan’s work is focused on observing and documenting the absurd, shedding light on cultural contrasts and celebrating the bizarre. Megan is a member of the multi-disciplinary art space MOXA20 in Bucharest and is one half of the DJ duo Miss Clitoral.

Courtesy of the artist and Anca Potera?u Gallery, Bucharest