Caroline Monnet
Pizandawatc / The One Who Listens / Celui qui écoute

[En anglais]

The trilingual title of Caroline Monnet’s current exhibition pays tribute to a traditional name in her maternal family, which means “the one who listens” in Anishinaabemowin. It’s also a fitting nod to the dialogical genesis of the exhibition, which evolved out of longstanding conversations between Monnet and curator Mona Filip. Originally conceived as a single-room presentation of Monnet’s braided and embroidered geometric abstractions, the exhibition spilled—like the uncontainable environmental forces channelled by her artworks—into adjoining galleries, until it ended up occupying the entire University of Toronto Art Centre. The result is an impressive overview of her protean practice.

Monnet’s artworks show us a world that, under the spell of unfulfilled modernization, seems permanently under construction. Assisting her parents to renovate and flip houses in her youth gave her early exposure to the industrial materials and building techniques that remain central to her practice today. Repurposing contractor-grade supplies—including cement, insulation, and plywood—she generates patterns evocative of the complex symmetries of Anishinaabe birch-bark-biting designs and of the rolling landforms in her ancestral territory.