Taking the pretext of new appointments to the Order of Arts and Letters of Quebec, The duty invites you into the imagination of artists whose exemplary work promotes culture.
On a wall in her studio, the pages of a large calendar remind multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet of her appointments, her deadlines, the exhibitions already scheduled, at least two years in advance, here and abroad. She will be in New York soon, at the Armory Show, a very popular art fair. Then at the Grand Palais in Paris. Then to Vienna. All of this involves long-term preparation.
Around her are busy a few assistants. “I am well surrounded. I have a strong team. Clearly, no one is unemployed.
Here, in a corner, sculptures made on the basis of wooden polyhedrons, made according to preparatory diagrams whose paper models are visible on a table. Further on, skilful colorful assemblies, made from the cutting of raw building materials gleaned from big-box hardware stores. There, assemblies made with strips of air barrier membranes.
Caroline Monnet navigates through a world. His world. She tells me about the colored plastic canvases used by the construction industry. She diverts the first use, to weave them like wicker baskets. Here, on this side of the workshop, are large pieces of plywood that she has cut out, according to diagrams previously made on the computer. A CNC cutting machine from another workshop does the rest. Rough materials, sewn and glued, become embroideries that open up a new look at our world.
“I would like to work as much in Europe as in America, while spending more time in the woods, at home,” says Caroline Monnet, seated calmly in front of me. She claims both her French and Anishinaabe origins. “I can’t be happy without spending time in the woods. And it’s not because I’m native! »
vision and expression
Caroline Monnet had first studied communication. She did journalism for a while, in the middle of the great prairies of Western Canada. An office at Radio-Canada, in Winnipeg, was not for her. No way. Ideas and projects were swirling around in her head, she says. “I saw a lot of aboriginal people there. I was thinking when I saw them. I questioned my own origins. »
To tell the truth, ideas interested her less than responding to a pressing “personal need”, she explains. “I am hypersensitive. Basically, it’s more the feelings that interest me. Art turned out to be a way of telling the world, as well as herself, “that the policies of assimilation hadn’t worked in [sa] family “. Art also allowed him to talk about the human condition, through the expression of a particular and complex rootedness: his own.
Between two trips, between two exhibitions that take her further and further around the world, Caroline Monnet gently tries to reclaim the Anishinaabe language. She is taking some classes. She only knew a few words, heard and memorized from the world of her childhood. Few things, she admits. “It’s very important to speak your language. The relationship to culture is affected. Identity too. It’s a bit what ties you to where you come from”, which in any case shapes its vision and expression.
She recalls with amusement that in Anishinabe, certain objects are by definition animated, alive, while others are not. “And gender doesn’t exist!” In other words, the way of looking at things is quite different. “By naming my works in Anishinabé, I learn the vocabulary. »
“I am proud to be an Anishinaabe woman, half French”. Part of her heart remains attached to Brittany, where she spent part of her life. For her, France’s heritage counts just as much as the changing Aboriginal realities experienced by her family. “I don’t love my father more than my mother!” My education comes from both sides. »
She spent all her summers in France. Why not dig this side too? “I may not be legitimate to dig the Breton side because I have no ancestors who come from there. I can contribute more by claiming my Anishinaabe identity. My French side is my privileged side. All my education is French. When I was a child, I was told that it was better to be French. » How to reassemble one’s identities into a whole? “I had to regain my self-confidence. I was looking for a sense of belonging. »
The split housing
Caroline Monnet considers, through her work, the terrible effects of the housing crisis on indigenous communities. His attention was immediately focused on the materials used on construction sites. What do these materials say about the world we live in? How to make them talk? She transformed them.
The habitat, reduced to the brutality of its raw materials, presents itself as a second skin on which it superimposes, for example, industrial embroidery patterns which evoke, in the brilliance of their colors, ancient arts.
Through her use of industrial materials, through their textures and bright colors, Caroline Monnet questions our relationship to housing as much as that of the clothing market, from an Aboriginal perspective. In particular, she took a series of photos, a sort of fake family portraits that reflect the real disarray of an era. What to be invited to Fashion Week! “I don’t want to reinvent myself as a clothing designer! That’s not the idea at all. “She also says this:” I am not here to give ready-made emotions, with a teaspoon. His work requires questioning oneself. At least she thinks so.
“When I show women posing in front of my camera, they are colourful, elegant, magical. It’s my sister… It’s my mother… It’s all women. I often put myself in the photo too. Everyone is under one and the same hat. It’s a building site. I really like this idea that you have to know how to deconstruct what is around you in order to rebuild it. Deconstructing systems: it has to be done. »
Make your cinema
Caroline Monnet’s life oscillates between the visual arts and cinema. With Bootlegger (2021), his first feature film, was about the vagueness of the question of the self-determination of peoples. She is now working on a second feature film project, with support from the Sundance Film Festival Fellowship.
Prizes and scholarships accumulate when she is not yet forty years old. Winner of a 2020 Sobey Prize for the Arts and the 2020 Pierre-Ayot Prize, she is now considered a major figure in the visual arts in Canada. “I am very lucky. I know it. While evoking tradition, I am in fact talking about universal things, such as attachment to the territory, the multiple and complex relationship to identity, to ecology. »
Does it have the impression that today it has been taken over in spite of itself by an art market eager for insurance in the face of the great questions of our time? “We are in a capitalist world. We cannot escape it. At the same time, artist-run centres, I believe, remain real spaces for experimentation. I prefer to be naive and consider that art can still carry something. I find that my role as an artist, basically, is not very far from the profession of sociologist. In any case, it seems to him that there is certainly a way there of “raising consciences”.