Echoes From a Near Future
Multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet presents visions of the future with a selection of recent works at Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto, on view now.
Caroline Monnet, Echoes from a Near Future, 2022. Ed. 1/3 Inkjet print mounted on aluminum, 80 x 120 in. Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Lesia Miga.
What can be envisioned when looking toward the future? Caroline Monnet dives into this question and more in her latest solo exhibition Echoes From a Near Future, on view now at the Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. Curated by David Liss and Anaïs Castro, the exhibition spans the past six years of the artist’s career with a diverse selection of thought-provoking works, many presented publicly for the first time. As with all her work in art and cinema, Monnet draws inspiration from her Anishinaabe and French heritage, while bringing forward “complex ideas around Indigenous identity and bicultural living through the examination of cultural histories”. Creating hybrid forms and new meanings is essential, “intending to assert Indigenous perspectives and methodologies that reverberate into the future.”
Installation view: Caroline Monnet, Echoes From a Near Future, 2022. Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Lesia Miga
While her signature style of implementing industrial materials – steel, wood, cement and more – to create these hybrid forms is on clear display in Echoes From a Near Future, it’s Monnet’s integration of textiles that centres the show. Framing “the garment as a conceptual time vessel”, textiles normally associated with clothing like denim, leather and cotton, and textiles associated with industrial uses like tarpaulin, Kevlar, and felt, are moulded to suggest records of humanity.
Installation view: Caroline Monnet, Waterfall I and II, 2016. Cement, denim and wood. 96 x 24 in. Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Lesia Miga.
In Waterfall 01 and Waterfall 02 (both 2016), cascades of denim, bound by cement and wood, represent flowing water. In Wounded (2022) (image below), black Kevlar is draped on the wall as if emerging from it, adorned with beads. A series of six busts made of cement, textiles and steel offer tribute to murdered and missing Indigenous women. A standout, large-scale colour photograph (image at top), also titled Echoes From a Near Future, enshrines three generations of Indigenous women dressed in six regalia pieces. They stand united with their gaze fixed on the viewer and toward the future.
Installation view: Caroline Monnet, Wounded, 2022; Le Buste de: series, 2016. Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Lesia Miga.
Monnet hails from Outaouais, Quebec. In her multidisciplinary practice, she works across media in sculpture, installation and film to grapple with colonialism’s impact, updating outdated systems with Indigenous methodologies. Monnet’s work has been acclaimed abroad and here in Canada over the past decade and featured in several prominent exhibitions and film festivals. Last year, she presented Ninga Mìnèh at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), her first solo showing at a major Canadian museum. Also in 2021, she received the Hopper Prize, and in 2020, a prestigious Sobey Art Award and the Prix Pierre-Ayot. Visitors to the AGO may be familiar with Monnet’s sculpture The Flow Between Hard Places (2019), currently on view alongside the work of other contemporary Indigenous artists in the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art on Level 2.
Echoes From a Near Future is on view at Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto until December 17. For more art news from Toronto and around the world, subscribe to AGOinsider.