Indigenous artist Caroline Monnet featured at Burlington Art Gallery

Holding up the Sky by Indigenous artist Caroline Monnet is currently being featured at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

Born to an Anishinaabe mother and a French father, Monnet is from Outaouais, Québec, and now based in Montreal. After studying at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada, in Spain, she pursued a career in visual arts and film. Her work is regularly presented internationally and can be found in prestigious museum, private, and corporate collections.

Monnet has become known for minimalist yet emotionally charged work that uses industrial materials and combines the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms.

“In this survey of new and recent works, multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet centres geometries, especially the cube, to draw attention to how different spatial relationships condition the way that we live and think,” said a gallery spokesperson.

“Monnet’s practice moves between textiles, photography, sculpture, and film to address the complexity of Indigenous identities and bilateral legacies, drawing from her Anishinaabe and French heritages.”

The exhibition features her new work The Room (2023), a 10-foot square construction of industrial-grade styrofoam, a material used in residential buildings to create water and air-resistive barriers and insulate against inclement climate conditions.

The Room is open on one side, exposing the box and welcoming the audience into its constructed space. The foam is incised with a repetitive pattern; the motifs, inspired by traditional Anishinaabe iconography, break the strictness of the industrial square form by introducing the personal and the poetic into architectural rigidity.

Monnet’s exhibition will be displayed until Mar. 23. The gallery is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Thursday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information, visit the AGB website.