WORKSITE
Curated by Greg Hill

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.