By Staff
January 12th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
In this survey of new and recent works, multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet centers geometries, especially the cube, to draw attention to how different spatial relationships condition the way that we live and think.
The Monnet work will be on display in the Lee Chin Gallery on January 13th.
The Room (2023), a ten-foot square construction of industrial-grade styrofoam.
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.
In her work, traditional Anishinaabe sacred geometry transforms and softens the industrial into something more personal, constructing a new point of view—centering the cube. As a form, the cube is present in architecture and many traditions of building, shaping the way we understand the world and dictating the ways in which we live, play, and learn. And, like the repetitious creations unfolded in birch biting, Holding Up The Sky follows a symmetrical continuum.
The exhibition features her new work The Room (2023), a ten-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.
