Caroline Monnet - Echoes
CURRENT EXHIBITION
2025 | Caroline Monnet - Echoes
PARIS, Bertrand Grimont Gallery
Feb 8 - Feb 17, 2025
Opening: Saturday, Feb 8, 2025, 5 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Blouin Division (Montreal, Toronto) and HdM (Paris) are pleased to present Echoes, an exhibition dedicated to the works of Anishnaabe/French artist Caroline Monnet. Hosted at the Bertrand Grimont Gallery (Paris), this exhibition highlights a selection of her recent works, offering a unique insight into her artistic practice.
The visual language of Caroline Monnet’s wall and sculptural works is distinguished by the use of industrial materials, blending traditional Anishinaabe motifs with sacred geometries. Just like the constantly evolving language, her visuals sometimes transform into patterns that evoke QR codes or urban planning maps, offering her a means to explore concepts such as territory and transmission.
This aesthetic exploration is also expressed in Echoes, her first clothing line, presented as part of the SWAIA Native Fashion Week at the Santa Fe Indian Market and during the Fashioning Indigenous Futurism runway at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Although the development of this collection involved its share of challenges, Caroline Monnet’s practice has always revolved around fashion. In 2020, she participated in a capsule collection with the brand Simons for Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto, and in 2022, she created futuristic garments for the staging of Echoes from a Near Future, a photographic portrait highlighting influential Indigenous women.
For the Echoes collection, Caroline Monnet deconstructs construction materials to reinterpret them as textiles, giving rise to coats made of insulating pink wool or jackets made from roofing membranes. By merging haute couture with industrial materials, the artist explores the tension created by transforming utilitarian items into visual poems. This collection is an emblem of both traditional and contemporary Indigenous craftsmanship. Using techniques such as embroidery, weaving, and laser cutting, the raw materials become unrecognizable, yielding creations that are both wearable and conceptual. Echoes offers a look towards the future by redefining the fashion world and bringing in new perspectives.
Of Algonquin descent on her mother's side and French on her father's, Caroline Monnet is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. Having studied sociology and communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain), her works are now part of many public and private collections in North America, as well as the permanent collection of UNESCO in Paris.
Caroline Monnet’s work has been unveiled at prestigious events such as the Whitney Biennial in New York, the Toronto Biennial of Art, the KØS Museum in Copenhagen, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, and the National Gallery of Canada. She has also left her mark on iconic venues with solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Arsenal Contemporary in New York, the Centre d'Art International de Vassivière in France, and the Art Gallery of the University of Toronto. Also a filmmaker, her films have been showcased at renowned festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, Aesthetica in the UK, and the Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2016, she became the first filmmaker from the First Nations to be selected for the prestigious Cinéfondation residency at the Cannes Film Festival in Paris, a pivotal moment in her career.
Caroline Monnet is the recipient of the 2020 Pierre-Ayot Award, the Merata Mita Fellowship from the Sundance Institute, and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Awards. She has also been honored by her nomination as Companion of the Arts and Letters of Quebec, a recognition of the significance of her work.
Caroline Monnet,Tagging the Underground 01-09, 2021
silkscreens on waterproofing membranes
panels 50 x 41 in.