SETAREH is thrilled to present Resilient to the Bones, an exhibition by Canadian artist Caroline Monnet. Including photography, sculpture and multimedia wall pieces, the exhibition presents a diverse range of recent work. Having presented an extensive exhibition of video work at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2021, this will be the first presentation of Monnet’s experimental forms in Germany.
Caroline Monnet draws from her studies in Sociology and Communications for a research based practice which investigates Indigenous experience through history and into today. By interweaving the geometries of past and present, her work realises complex hybrid forms to express this bicultural experience. Often incorporating contemporary building materials, multiple graphic traditions are conjoined in the works, exploring the interrelated aspects of Modern and Indigenous image making. This unique language expresses itself as a porthole of understanding, a space that both exposes imperialist structures and offers aesthetic potentials of cross cultural fertilisation towards a commonality.
Important for the works in Resilient to the Bones, and characteristic of much art by Caroline Monnet, is exploring the notion of home. We encounter this first in a literal sense, compositions made with customary building materials. These industrially fabricated materials used in home construction are common across the globe. The artworks take this physicality head on, exposing the materials which usually lay hidden under floors and behind walls. She has spoken about wanting to expose the bones of our houses, our unnatural but essential built habitats. Here are those materials used to keep nature out. Miraculous insulators which hold the good heat in and various temperature fluctuations at bay. Here they are laid bare, their unnaturalness exposed. Often composed of plastics and glues that may cause health problems, these components meant to condition nature often become a conditioning element of their own. When the materials fail, such as when pink insulation gets wet and rendered futile, they become the fecund home for mold, nourished unseen behind these barriers, often becoming the black mold know as stachybotrys chartarum. Now a harbinger for spores, these artificially constructed ecosystems become poisonous homes, homes which erode immune function and undermine emotional, spiritual and psychological well being. The very environments meant to hold and protect instead unfortunately harm. Monnet takes up these materials, not merely to indicate their unstable and potentially damaging dimensions, but to realise works that transform their ubiquitous presence. Her project transforms them into something which can hold the values of creativity and inspiration beyond their purely economic functionality. In doing so, she is interested in utilising the methods of Indigenous cultural knowledge to transform these products themselves into portals for new becoming.
Caustic Lights is a diptych composed of under-flooring, a dense material used beneath floorboards for insulation and sound absorption. The lines are adapted from traditional Anishinaabe designs, patterns used on regalia or moccasins to tell stories and identify families at gatherings. Monnet’s contemporary interpretations are made on the computer. She sees this as a form of futurism, the lines sharing visual similitude with QR codes or digital mapping. The commodification of the Commons also influences these trace forms. From an Indigenous world view, land is not something that one can own, it is something we are one with it and which we actually belong to. Monnet became interested in the drafting of maps by looking at the way her mothers community of Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg was parcelled and compartmentalised in rectangular shapes. Thinking across multiple generations, she explores how modernism reformed the land around us, making borders amongst neighbours. Tracing these figures she tracks how these divisions form the economy of land. Extraction and manufacture also make their impactful scars, forests burnt down to provide room for agriculture, clear cutting for forestry, the redirection of waterways with the intrusion of roads and utilities. The work seeks to imagine how this treatment of land effects everything we are. Never repeating the same design twice, she creates ever shifting compositional varieties as a form of language that evolves over time. It is the language of her futurist imaginings. Monnet lets these figures unroll while creating the design, entering a meditative state she charts their ebbs and flows as expressions. The Caustic Lights shimmer when the sun hits the water, glimmering luster on the surface. The title of the piece is reflective of the colours chosen and how the geometries work through the materials themselves to realise images of the natural environment.
In other works the use of traditional methods guides the creation of the image. Wanagay takes a disposable plastic material that is on every construction site, used to cover floors, generally protect from construction dust, close off open windows, and other production solutions. It has been taken from these temporary tasks and claimed as image and support. The material has been woven with traditional technique for baskets and shot through with strokes of black embroidery. The grommets that punctuate the parameter gesture to utility. Monnet says the work is inspired by woven eel traps. Interlocking the bands of polyurethane realises an oscillating shimmer which catches light like scales, a translation of the works title. Framing the Bones also takes up construction plastic and stretches it across a grid of four stretchers. This internal support from these structural bones are exposed, the wood showing through, its apparatus a visible part of the whole. Traditional designs drafted by computer are concisely embroidered across this utilitarian surface. The punctuated lines of thread mark out a cosmic plan, a centrifugal configuration in blues, black and red, a potential map for future thinking. Worlds Apart uses two types of contrasting building material, press board to signify natural as opposed to industrially reflective insulation board, which are then carved with a traditionally inspired design. Again interested in addressing colonial encounters, the Anishinaabee motives with flower like shapes started to appeared after European contact. Taking these settler influenced designs, Caroline vectorizes them on the computer. She sees them as portals which contain traditional knowledge, wisdom which extends through and beyond notions of past and present, transcending Western concepts of time and space.
To access this wisdom we need to eschew linear assumptions and approach them in a manner which allows them to speak. Some formal aspects are taken directly from oral histories of these designs, like that a triangle going up means sky, one pointing down earth. Incorporated into Monnet’s pictures she utilises this knowledge to recognise that in Indigenous teaching we are always a part of the bigger world, that even here in compartmentalised conditions we are actually always impacted by the everything. In our highly divided world, one of deep separation and conflict, this knowledge is shared to bring us together and acknowledge that we are actually a whole. Through contemporary configurations based in ancestral knowledge, Monnet works to keep these knowledge forms alive to enrich humankind today.
Another important notion of habitat is the body as a home, a person as their home as well as their sense of home as a place, or associations of a home. For Indigenous people it is complex to speak about what makes a home. Generations of displacement and genocide have dislodged communities from their sense of personal place. For them, sometimes home is not a safe place, it is not full of longing or compassion, not necessarily joyful. Land ownership is layered with the historical complexities of class, capital, race, religion, and colonialism. Their modern condition is one of displacement, a self without a home, a place that once was which now defines self through alienating conditions. For Monnet, this exhibition is made as an act of love and healing towards retrieving the notion of the home in multiple dimensions. She is concerned with the house we build, both material and spiritual, and conceives her art as a way to reintegrate the schisms which estrange us from our environment and communities.
The Ikwewak are First Nation women who are very active in their communities. They are ceremonially clothed in couture creations which likewise radically transform common building materials. Here, Monnet presents embodied voices in her manifestation of a creative futurism. These bold figures have stepped away from conscribed anthropological pasts. They claim space for eccentricity, exuding elegance with a natural resilience. Codes of high fashion bring strength to their contemporary regalia, cloaked with purpose. They look directly at the camera, demanding to be seen with quiet reserve, they step up and want to be a part of social politics and of building a future for next generations. Their forms are echoed in the Goddess(es), a new series of sculptural abstractions inspired by the silhouettes in the Ikwewak photos. They are humans in utterly modern form. The two work together, the real and the abstracted realising lines of polarising energy. We move among them and feel their force to make change, matriarchal societies emerging to lead the way. These monolithic figures honour this emergence. The Goddess(es) bare form also goes back to the artists method of exposing the bones, taking away the built up layers till we are left with the core of the human form. Together this group may act as constellations, clusters of stars for looking into a future potentials filled with hope. A world that is opposite of how indigenous woman are regularly viewed as uneducated and complacent victims. Their truth is pristine. Eccentric, elegant and resilient.
Occasionally text speaks directly in her works, such as Love Hard, a densely woven composition with this tough message at its core. Monnet often uses typography to integrate quotes that emerge from the everyday, heard in some conversation or something from politics, a song she enjoyed, any something that has meaning for her. Love Hard is such a statement, evolved from strong words she has heard from smart independent matriarchs, some personal, some political. For this exhibition in Berlin, she sees this particular works message resonating for right now as borders continue to be realigned through ongoing conflicts and subsequent refugee surges, nation states actively ordering the separation of people and the resulting inherent social disparities. In face of this contemporary situation of displacement, Monnet encourages us to stand fast, to look deeply, to reflect on integration and to love hard.
Monnet’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, New York; the Toronto Biennial of Art; KØS museum, Copenhagen; Contemporary Art Museum Montréal; National Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and presented solo exhibitions at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.