Dominique Landinez is a DC painter exploring themes of unconventional relationship styles and love, the radicalization of women, misandry, polyamory, and psychology. Dominique earned her bachelor’s in Psychology from Tufts University while also learning how to paint with oils through several art classes provided by the University. She is fascinated with the intersection of psychology and painting. She values the information we can retrieve about the brain and the mind from simply looking at images. In psychology, there are common tropes that are accepted by society in the United States, better known as sexual scripts. Dominique takes the term sexual script, which is widely accepted in the academic world, and converts the concept into visual representations that are visceral and confrontational, which in itself is radical. Dominique is most interested in the sexual script of a woman, or how a woman should act, behave, or be in the context of the world, marriage, relationships, and everyday life. Dominique explores these themes in her works titled “boy toy”, “puppet” and “delusions”. “Boy toy” is a nickname that women will often give to the man that they are engaging with, flipping the script of how women are expected to be treated in relationships with men. It pictures a woman holding a grown man, who is the size of a toy. She is quite literally “playing” with this toy, disregarding his feelings and emotions. By radically flipping the sexual script, women have more agency to their bodies and how men will treat them. They are taking back power that was once used to oppress them and through misandry, are making people question conventional relationships between men and women. Dominique uses “misandry” as a thought experiment or tool to flip the power and expose inequity. “Puppet” shows a small man, similar to a puppet, with a raw bum being observed by a woman. This draws on themes of submission, degredation, and humiliation–which are emotions that all women have felt by men at least once in their lifetimes. “Delusions” shows a woman playing with a small man too, you can see the movement in her hair and her body but the man is still, which flips the script, and symbolizes how men keep women still in their ways of thinking and mindset. Psychology provided a lens to her art, while teaching offered a method of how to guide an audience towards new understanding. 

Though her work requires a level of maturity and explores adult matters, her work teaching children solidified her belief that introducing these concepts at an early age is important. These paintings give adults the tools to teach children a mindset that women should be taught at a young age that they are strong, capable, and resilient. She taught art to a diverse population ranging from children of families seeking asylum to children with Austism to those in gifted programs. Teaching art shaped her approach by taking complex concepts and making them clear and absorbable to her audience. 

Dominique engages in performance art events in the DMV area with her own drawing series called “Kink n’ Draw”, which is another perspective of the same practice. This drawing series is an inclusive, safe space for artists, music lovers, queer, polyamorous and polycurious people to engage with drawing a nude model. This theatrical performance paired with different poses, props and outfits typically lasts 3 hours and has gained considerable popularity– with almost every event selling out and garnering thousands of views on Instagram. 

Dominique’s work matters to children, to culture, and to art discourse. Children, from an early age, absorb cultural scripts early. By introducing these concepts early on, you intervene in the calcification of maladaptive thought processes. Dominique’s paintings matter to culture as they dismantle existing frameworks of thinking regarding relationships between men and women, and give agency to women. Her artwork is evocative, unconventional, and flips the script by reclaiming the female image from the male gaze. She fuses psychology, painting, and performance to expand discourse in contemporary art.