Media Share Caroline Monnet Mobilize Caroline Monnet is

Media Share Caroline Monnet Mobilize

Caroline Monnet is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. She studied in Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain) before pursuing a career in visual arts and films. The artist works in sculpture, installation, performance and film, with themes addressing Indigenous identity from a bicultural perspective. Monnet uses visual and media arts to demonstrate a keen interest in communicating complex ideas around Indigenous identity and bicultural living through the examination of cultural histories. Her work is often minimalistic while emotionally charged and speaks to the beautifully intricate limbo of indigenous peoples today. Monnet has made a signature for working with industrial materials, combining the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual-cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. Monnet is always in the stage on experimentation and invention, both for herself and for the work. (https: //carolinemonnet. ca/STATEMENT) Monnet is the recipient of numerous awards including the Sobey Art Award in 2020 and in 2017 the most promising project recognition at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Sheaf Award for best experimental film and the Walter Phillips Gallery Indigenous Commission Award.

Mobilize takes us on a journey from the northern lands to the urban south. The rhythmic montage, composed entirely from the archival footage of the NFB (National Film Board of Canada), follows Indigenous bodies constantly on the move through radically different landscapes, performing the strength and skill of everyday life. Edited to the beat of Tanya Tagaq’s song “Uja, ” hands thread sinew through snowshoes, axes peel birch bark to make a canoe, a paddler navigates icy white waters, young men and women arrive into the city as construction workers and city drifters. Mobilize negotiates notions of labor and its representation between urban/modern and traditional/native lands Part of the Souvenir series, it’s one of four films by First Nations filmmakers that address Indigenous identity and representation, reframing Canadian history through a contemporary lens.

Like ships in the night centres around a journey that Montreal-based, Algonquin artist and filmmaker Caroline Monnet took in the summer of 2012, where she boarded a ship docked at the Dutch port of Ijmuiden, on the coast west of Amsterdam. What ensued was a twenty-two-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, documented by the artist via handheld Mini DV. Growing up in Outaouais, Quebec, and in Brittany, France, the work draws upon her time spent on both sides of the ocean. The vessel eventually docked in Montreal, only to continue its journey through the Great Lakes region to Cleveland, to unload many tonnes of steel to make American cars… Monnet’s film becomes a narrative for upending perspective, as well as for the transmission of information across impossible divides. Meditative, the film continually washes into itself and then retreats, an inkblot test made from our collective consciousness of this body of water. The imagery of the journey is dotted by markers of industry, refracted light, ships as shadows in the distance, and boiler rooms of infinite gauges; with Morse code and jamming radio signals providing a continuous backing track. Like ships in the night also features new concrete, text and copper works, as well as a triptych of photographs framed to destabilize the imagery’s horizon.

Drawn from the 1864 poem Tales of a Wayside Inn, the exhibition title speaks to a momentary union between two entities. More recently, the idiom has come to describe a missed connection between two people or communities; a divergent or transient relationship undone by interpersonal, geographic or cultural divides. Framed together, Monnet critiques the colonial, industrial and economic interchange between Canada and Europe as an indigenous woman. Like ships in the night speaks to the interconnectedness and the diversity of views that shape our place within the world, shedding light on the given historical and cultural complexities of our contemporary colonial context.