Roxanne Ducharme's 'The Dove Room' Reimagines Fashion Photography as Ritual Surveillance

Roxanne Ducharme presents 'The Dove Room', a series of ten AI-generated images featuring women and doves, marking a shift toward hyperrealism in her practice. The work appropriates the visual code of editorial fashion photography to create scenes of ritual, surveillance, and unease. Ducharme, a professional with decades of experience in illustration, art direction, and animation, now employs generative AI informed by cinema and image construction. The white interiors function as power structures, evoking a displaced Versailles where women gather for an unexplained ceremony. Figures are not passive but hold the scene, conditioning the viewer's position. Styling—elaborate braided structures resembling sculptural crowns—elevates them to archetypal status. The white dove, traditionally a symbol of peace, becomes an ambiguous witness and silent surveillance presence. Technical choices like shallow depth of field and extreme attention to textures (feathers, braids, upholstery) build visual luxury without technical exhibitionism. Comparisons are drawn to John Singer Sargent's 'Madame X' for its construction of feminine distance and authority, and to Yorgos Lanthimos's film 'The Favourite' for its use of wide-angle lenses to create courtly intrigue and spatial tension. The series is featured in creAtIva AI Art Book Vol/9 'ART: it is argument', with an artist text, voice narrative, and augmented reality video.