Korean Dreams is the most recent project of the Canadian photographer Nathalie Daoust. In it, she uses darkroom techniques to manipulate photos she took while visiting North Korea. The resulting images depict what she views as a country whose public sphere is mired in artifice, apart from reality and out of time, due to a way of life forced on the populace by a repressive authoritarian regime.

Samantha Small, an art writer from New York, writes: “Daoust deliberately obscures her photographs during the development stage, as the layers of film are peeled off, the images are stifled until the facts become ‘lost’ in the process and a sense of detachment from reality is revealed. This darkroom method mimics the way information is transferred in North Korea—the photographs, as the North Korean people, are both manipulated until the underlying truth is all but a blur. The resultant pictures speak to North Korean society, of missing information and truth concealed.”

Korean Dreams will be exhibited in Espace F Gallery in Matane, QC, until January 19, 2019, and in Watson Art Centre in Dauphin, Manitoba, from February 1 to March 29, 2019.

Nathalie Daoust works primarily with analog photography techniques and often uses experimental darkroom methods. She is an award-winning artist whose work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions worldwide.