Dominique Fung: Coastal Navigation

Los Angeles

February 12 – March 19, 2022

Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale
Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale
Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale
Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale
Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale
Dominique Fung painting Nicodim Gallery art sale

Press Release

Coastal Navigation, Dominique Fung’s second solo exhibition with Nicodim, is a Jungian dreamscape of epic proportions set within ten large-scale paintings. While furthering her fixation on the secret lives of anthropomorphized artifacts, this body of work is more focused on their collective journey than the history and personality of the individual. They are visions of displacements, migrations, settlements, and discoveries of entire populations. If life begins in water and every voyage is a step towards death, the subjects within contain countless beginnings, endings, and lives lived in-between.

 

Each of the canvases is a self-contained universe that can be read as a standalone, or a piece of Fung’s grander, nonlinear narrative. The exhibition is rooted in a sequence of six works, identical in scale, that follow an expedition from the ocean to the shore. It begins with “A Point in Time or Space which Something Begins,” in which a goose-shaped teapot lays a golden egg aboard a vessel tugged afloat by disembodied hands at the mercy of the waves, and finishes with “A Point in Time or Space which Something Ends,” as a team of settlers tether a pagoda to the land beneath the waist of a watchful deity. Like the subjects they portray, each work will be displaced from the original narrative by the currents of the art world—Fung has dictated that no two canvases find a home in the same place. The coast is the end of the ocean, the ocean is the end of the coast.

 

The passage of populations continues over four even larger paintings, two by land and two under the sea. “Traverse Across” depicts a rickshaw displacing wares and souls from countless locations to untold destinations—lobsters (a nod Fung’s surrealist tendencies), fish, and flautists all unlikely companions on the cart, homeless, though not necessarily in search of a final resting place. “Deep Sea Expedition” unearths a community that has found a final resting place, excavated, perhaps unwillingly, by more busy hands, pushing them to a second (or third, or fourth) life in the name of adventure and profit. (Deep sea excavations are traditionally funded by the sale of their plunder.) For Fung, the end of the story is just another beginning.

Coastal navigation, by definition, is an orientation method to determine a seabound vessel’s location in relation to landmarks on the shore and the visible objects under the sea. Coastal Navigation calls into question the grounding of these landmarks themselves. When everything is forever in flux, then aren’t we all in a constant state of being displaced?

 

Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology in Toronto, Canada. Recent exhibitions include Women of Now: Dialogues of Identity, Memory and Place, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, Texas (2022); Dominique Fung and Katherina Olschbaur: My Kingdom and a Horse, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, two-artist); It’s Not Polite to Stare, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, United States (2021; solo) PAPA RAGAZZE!, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, United States (2020); Relics and Remains, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2020, solo); Friends and Friends of Friends: Artistic Communities in the Age of Social Media, Schlossmuseum, Linz, Austria (2020); Wash Your Corners, Ross + Kramer, New York, New York, United States (2019, solo); and Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Taymour Grahne, London, United Kingdom (2019, solo).

Selected Works

Selected Works Thumbnails
Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Begins, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Begins, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Marine Horn, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Marine Horn, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Continuing by Boat, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Continuing by Boat, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Liminal Time and Space, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Liminal Time and Space, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
A Move to Land, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
A Move to Land, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Ends, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Ends, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm

Dominique Fung
Traverse Across, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm
 

Dominique Fung
Traverse Across, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm
 

Dominique Fung
Traverse Through, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm

Dominique Fung
Traverse Through, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm

Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Expedition, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm

Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Expedition, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm

Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Beds, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm

Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Beds, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm

Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Begins, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
Marine Horn, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
Continuing by Boat, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
Liminal Time and Space, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
A Move to Land, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
A Point in Time or Space which Something Ends, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 50 in
182.9 x 127 cm
Dominique Fung
Traverse Across, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm
 
Dominique Fung
Traverse Through, 2022
oil on canvas
108 x 76 in
274.3 x 193 cm
Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Expedition, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm
Dominique Fung
Deep Sea Beds, 2022
oil on canvas
72 x 96 in
182.9 x 243.8 cm