Caroline Monnet

A mysterious, undulating cement column more than two metres high will be the first artwork confronting visitors at a summer-long exhibition at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. The topic is the fate of Indigenous languages under colonialism. Art from North America and the South Pacific will be included.

The cement sculpture created in 2019 by Algonquin-French artist Caroline Monnet, a Sobey Art Award finalist last year, is titled The Flow Between Hard Places. The curves on the sculpture mimic the soundwaves created in uttering the word “pasapkedjinawong” (“the river that passes between the rocks”) in Anishinaabemowin, as spoken by Anishinaabe Elder Rose Wawatie-Beaudoin. 

The sculpture was inspired by an event almost 200 years ago when Chief Pakinawatik, of Kitigan Zibi First Nation in the Outaouais region of Quebec north of Ottawa, paddled 600 kilometres to Toronto to request the Crown return traditional territory taken from his people.

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Caroline Monnet, “The Flow Between Hard Places,” 2019

cement sculpture, 96″x 48″x 24″ (photo courtesy Galerie Blouin Division, Montreal; collection Art Gallery of Ontario)

John Hampton, the MacKenzie’s director, was so impressed by the sculpture that he discarded the working title of the exhibition he is curating with Léuli Eshrāghi to choose a new title reflecting Monnet’s work. Pasapkedjinawong: La rivière qui passe entre les rochers – the river that passes through the rocks is scheduled to open May 13 and close Sept. 19. (The gallery closed temporarily as of March 24 due to new public health rules announced this week in Regina amid rising COVID-19 numbers.)

“We really loved Caroline’s work as this metaphor for how languages shift and evolve and respond and are frozen sometimes,” says Hampton. “It was, for us, an evocative metaphor.”

The MacKenzie is just one of several venues from Vancouver to Frankfurt showing work this year by this Montreal-based multimedia artist, who, according to her occasional collaborator, Quebec artist and curator Stefan St-Laurent, remains “absolutely modest” and even “a little shy” despite her skyrocketing career. 

Her repertoire includes sculpture, paintings, videos, installations and even a feature film, Bootlegger, which is currently in post-production and is being submitted to the Calgary International Film Festival, which runs from Sept. 23 to Oct. 3. Monnet developed the script five years ago at a Paris residency with an organization tied to the Cannes Film Festival. The film explores issues related to alcohol on a fictional reserve.

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Caroline Monnet, “Mobilize,” 2015

film, 2:48 min. (courtesy of the National Film Board)

At least two of Monnet’s short films are to be part of DOXA, Vancouver’s annual documentary film festival, which runs May 6 to May 16. DOXA has not yet released the titles in its program, but expect the inclusion of Mobilize, Monnet’s signature, three-minute, heart-pounding film from 2015 that illustrates the evolution of First Nations’ skills from traditional crafts to the construction of skyscrapers. The film’s high-energy soundtrack is by Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq.

Mobilize is also included in an important Group of Seven exhibition, Magnetic North, organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened in March at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle. The Group of Seven generally ignored First Nations in their paintings of a seemingly pristine, uninhabited Canada. Monnet’s inclusion in the exhibition reminds viewers the territory was inhabited before European settlement and these Indigenous Peoples remain, as Monnet says, “at the centre of the action.” 

The Kunsthalle is also exhibiting in its rotunda magical works by Monnet owned by the National Gallery: Proximal I, II, III, IV, V. The five spheres are placed on the floor, frequently in front of Transatlantic, a 15-minute video that docu­ments the artist’s 22-day journey by cargo ship from Europe to Canada.

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Caroline Monnet, “Maniwaki,” 2018

Tyvek® and Masonite (collection François R. Roy; photo by Paul Litherland)

Other exhibitions this year include a solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from April 21 to Aug. 1 titled Ninga Mìnèh. Here, cheap construction materials, often found in poorly built homes on reserves, are turned into aesthetically pleasing geometric patterns. As well, Monnet’s mixed-media work, We come in numbers, is in the group exhibition Early Days: Indigenous Art, at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto. The show opened in November and continues until May 30.

Monnet grew up in Aylmer, a town that's now part of Gatineau, Que., on the north shore of the Ottawa River. In 2006, she attended a meeting in Calgary for young Indigenous leaders and decided to return home by bus because she had never seen the country beyond Quebec. She got as far as Winnipeg, stopped there, fell in love with the city’s Indigenous art community and stayed for five years. It was there in 2009, while still in her early 20s, that she made her first short film, Ikwé, as part of the Mosaic Women’s Film Project. The experimental film won praise for its depiction of the passage of knowledge between generations.

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Caroline Monnet, “Memories Unravelled,” 2021

embroidery on synthetic roofing felt, 49” x 96.5” x 3” (collection Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Government of Canada)

St-Laurent says Monnet is much in demand, not just because of her originality, but because of her professionalism and her ability “to create an artistic community around her.” Other artists, of all kinds, are drawn to her and her work. That includes Pascale Bussières, one of Quebec’s best-known film actors, who agreed to star in Bootlegger, in part because of her love of Monnet’s work in other media.

Identity politics is central to much of Monnet’s oeuvre, says St-Laurent. “It’s never obvious. You have to spend time with her work and figure it out on your own, which is much more interesting than things being a little too obvious. There’s always a bit of mystery around the work.”

In Regina, Hampton is clearly drawn to Monnet’s work. “I am a fan,” he says. “I think that Caroline has a real exceptional ability to move between mediums with not only conceptual rigour but also with the aesthetic and formal sophistication where she really can embrace the strengths and ability of each medium to do something very different. She just has a very good understanding of the essence of material and of the process behind it and how that ultimately fits in relation with the viewer.” ■  

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