Blue Roof Studios, Los Angeles – August 2023 

Photos by Peter Kirby and Rosanna Albertini

This day belongs not to successive time

but to the spectral realms of memory.

As in dreams, behind the tall doors there is nothing,

not even emptiness.

As in dreams, behind the face that looks at us there is no one.

Obverse without reverse,

coin of a single face, all things.

Those miseries of memory are the goods

that a precipitous time leaves to us. 

 {the last two lines re-translated by me, the rest is 

by Norman Thomas di Giovanni}

We are our memory,

we are this chimerical museum of shifting forms,

this heap of broken mirrors. 

Jorge Luis Borges, IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS, fragment of ‘Cambridge’, 1975

A MUSEUM OF SHIFTING FORMS 

as if sliding on shifting sand, the nomadic life of an artist

 by Rosanna Albertini

sitting by a person you feel the best of you warming your veins  it rarely happens a gift of life that will never get lost over the years and doesn’t have anything to do with decisions intentions or good feelings evaluations calculations even with chronological time or understanding Dominique is that person

FROM AN APOCRYPHAL GOSPEL : Blessed are they which wear not their suffering as a crown of glory

to progressively become legally blind for macula degeneration changed the kind of art Dominique makes not at all her destiny as an artist her attachment to objects she found or found her transient through obliterated stories until the artist grabs them and gives them a place in her art and in her life up to the point in space that gives each fragment a new way of existing as a solidified memory part visual part written with stories emerging from her days but spreading an aura in the way they appear so that visitors walking by the aisle of her studio under the blue roof conceived like a church can join Dominique’s memories unveiling her feelings as she brought to the public the small myths she built around them

“when i find a nest it always reminds me of home” DM

“my time to enter this world was induced so I was determined to make my entrance feet first…” DM

the little mouse was my pet when I was in elementary school and taking the bus I had it in my hands in a small box that one day fell on floor but everyone on the bus helped me to bring it back (Dominique told me and Peter this story as we moved from one to another area of the shelves)

call it fable or myth names do not change the nature of human streaming through a moment a place  whose reality disappeared —history? memory isn’t remembering it’s a constant recreating what else can be the reason for existing what else can break all the boundaries other than organizing unique spaces in which everyone can be in touch with the “magnetic core”  mentioned by Henry Miller  the core which attract human beings toward each other despite their ineradicable differences

if you no longer believe in thinking but rather in reality

“one thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you” (HENRY MILLER)

the blue hand with the middle finger pierced by a hole along with her eyes cutting distance away piling broken glasses and who knows how many other alterations Dominique does not say make the stories flow in her memory killing the distance of time and moving moving to and fro 

it is not time that exist

not even space that counts if we miss the ‘secret sacred core’ from which the soul is lifted with surprise by touching with the wings of our eyes the artist’s feelings towards those objects which are the beauty of her art which are the fluid sense of love for the movement of life

wherever we pose wherever she ends always temporarily