Denise Dumas, sculptor and video artist, Wilton

Denise Dumas earned her Master’s Degree in Creation (Visual Arts) from the University of Quebec in Montreal, and pursued advanced studies in sculpture at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London, England. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Quebec. She is adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, was adjunct professor at the New Hampshire Institute of Art from 2000-2002 and a tenured art teacher at College Edouard-Montpetit in Quebec. Dumas received a SODAC First Grand Prize for “The Laureates” and other awards from the Canada Council and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Quebec. Her public work can be viewed at Logan Airport in Boston (ArtRock), and in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, which is a project commissioned by the Quebec 1% for Art Program.  She has had multiple solo exhibitions from Lowell, Mass., to Peterborough, N. H. to Quebec City to Montreal and many juried and group exhibitions throughout the northeast and Quebec. This will be Dumas’s first State Arts Council Fellowship.

“My work explores the ‘boundary condition’, which I define as the challenge we all face to maintain a stable and coherent sense of identity. Inspired by my immigration to the USA, my art looks at perceptual reality as a mental construct that changes depending on the places one inhabits and on social context. Surpassing the issues relating to redefinition and reinvention I addressed in my earlier work, I am presently focusing on how the unsettling political, social, ecological and economical climate affects us all as the context I explore in my multi-media installation.”

“Within that context, my work addresses psychologically charged situations, while exploring the language and its inventive uses, to visually translate aspects of human behavior and consciousness. This takes form in the metaphorical situations I create, in which I either perform, film, or use my sculptures as theatre or as actors. Displacing/misplacing, overlapping, or combining different scales within the image are among the strategies I use to create complex and layered points of view when mixing real and virtual imagery.”

Photo by Julie Mento

Last updated: September 11, 2009