WORKSITE
Caroline Monnet
Curated by Greg Hill
Sept 8 - Oct 21, 2023 at 21 Cortlandt Alley, 2nd Floor, New York
Caroline Monnet, Mitik (2023),
maple and lacquer,
35 x 18 x 11.57 in
Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present WORKSITE, a solo exhibition of new work by Montreal based artist Caroline Monnet. Curated by Greg A. Hill, former Audain Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada, this is Monnet’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Over the past decade, Caroline Monnet has developed a multifaceted and expansive practice that combines art, film, architecture and furniture design. She employs forms that are deeply rooted in her rich Anishinaabe and French heritage to articulate hybrid expressions of an Indigenous worldview and its methodologies. Her work offers a fresh and unique perspective on the broader heritage of material culture.
The works featured in this exhibition were predominantly created over the last year and center around Monnet's ongoing exploration of modern home construction materials. Through family house renovation projects experienced in childhood, Monnet developed a fascination for the transformative process of construction. This familiarity bred an affinity for building materials that only grew over time—the unfinished walls, fiberglass insulation, tar paper, and even the presence of spiders. The familiarity with and fondness for these materials catalyzed a profound deconstructive exploration of the realm of domestic construction.
Seen in aggregate, Monnet's practice evinces a compulsion to be continuously making, continuously building, manifested as a lively aesthetic practice and a strong work ethic. She sustains, moreover, an unwavering commitment to her craft as a way of being that transcends mere productivity. Hill likens Monnet’s spirit to that of the diligent beaver. As Hill reminds us, “for the beaver it is also a matter of survival, if it doesn’t always gnaw, its incisors will grow in an arc that will eventually pierce its throat.”
Monnet’s work also articulates a critique of the construction industry, and its detrimental environmental impact, by leveraging the physical qualities of materials and imbuing them with new meanings. For example, she uses gypsum board, or drywall, an omnipresent material in house building. If exposed to high humidity over extended periods, however, it can be host to dangerous mold. The artist uses this board as a substrate in some of her work, creating intricate symmetrical patterns by growing black mold in a highly controlled manner. The resulting juxtaposition toys sardonically with an otherwise insidious substance that is often present in the subpar housing of too many Indigenous communities.
With these recent works, Caroline Monnet draws from the modern built environment, as well as from her blended heritage, to invest pedestrian construction materials with new meanings, and to create artworks with the ability to tell their own stories.
Caroline Monnet (b. 1985, Ottawa, Canada) is a Anishinaabe/French multidisciplinary artist. Deploying visual and media arts to demonstrate complex ideas, Monnet renders Indigenous identity and bicultural living through an examination of shifting cultural histories. She is noted for working with industrial materials and processes, blending vocabularies of popular and traditional visual knowledges with tropes of modernist abstraction to create a unique formal language. Consistently occupying the stage of experimentation and invention, her work grapples with the impact of colonialism by updating outdated systems with Indigenous methodologies.
Her work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial (NYC), Toronto Biennal of Art, KØS museum (Copenhagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Solo exhibitions include Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Arsenal Contemporary (Toronto) and Centre d’art international de Vassivière (France). Her films have been programmed at film festivals such as TIFF, Sundance, Aesthetica (UK), Palm Springs and ImagineNative. Her work is included in in public and private collection, including the permanent UNESCO collection in Paris. She is based in Montreal and is represented by Blouin Division Gallery.
Greg A. Hill (b. Fort Erie, Ontario) is an artist and curator based in Chelsea, Quebec. He is a Kanyen’kehàka member of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. As a curator, Hill worked in museums for almost 30 years, most notably as the National Gallery of Canada’s Audain Senior Curator of Indigenous Art (2008-23) where he was dedicated to building the collection of Indigenous art and presenting a series of retrospective exhibitions for senior Indigenous artists in Canada—Norval Morrisseau 2006, Robert Davidson 2007, Daphne Odjig 2009, Carl Beam 2010, Charles Edenshaw 2014, Alex Janvier 2016, and Shelly Niro 2023. He also established an ongoing series of international Indigenous art exhibitions with Sakahán 2013 and Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Fue continuel 2019-20. Through astute acquisitions from those shows he founded a world-leading collection of works by the most significant national and international Indigenous artists of our time.
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