Echoes from a Near Future

Curated by David Liss and Anaïs Castro

Opening Reception

Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto is delighted to present Echoes from a Near Future, a solo exhibition by Montreal-based artist Caroline Monnet that brings together a diverse selection of works created since 2016, including a number of new pieces presented to the public for the first time.

Over the past decade, Caroline Monnet has developed a prolific and extensive multidisciplinary practice that fluidly combines vocabularies rooted in conceptual art, identity and materiality. Monnet constructs poetic narratives that disrupt prescribed Indigenous histories while projecting new meanings onto a shared, bilateral legacy. Drawing from both her Anishinaabe and French heritages, Monnet envisions hybrid forms and creates provocative images intended to assert Indigenous perspectives and methodologies that reverberate into the future.

This exhibition frames the garment as a conceptual time vessel. In some of the works, drapery is used as memento. If it appears as an exhumed vestige in Frank, it functions almost as an exoskeleton in the case of Wounded. Monnet’s use of textiles suggests records of humanity, whether they are refined and associated with clothing, such as denim and cotton, or cruder ones such as felt and tarp. Her series of busts offer a poignant tribute to murdered and missing Indigenous women. At times, the material performs as a landscape, through the cascades of denim in Waterfall 01 and Waterfall 02, and the pixelated panorama in kabeshinàn (camp). Ultimately, Echoes from a Near Future reflects a multidimensional epistemology. Under the benevolent watch of three generations of Indigenous women, six regalia pieces form a central portal to futurity - a vignette into a propitious destiny.