Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. Deploying visual and media arts to demonstrate complex ideas, Monnet renders Indigenous identity and bicultural living through an examination of shifting cultural histories. She is noted for working with industrial materials processes, blending vocabularies of popular and traditional visual knowledge with tropes of modernist abstraction to create a unique formal language. Consistently occupying the stage of experimentation and invention, her work grapples with the impact of colonialism by updating outdated systems with Indigenous methodologies.
Monnet studied Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain) before pursuing a career in visual arts and film. Her work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial (NYC), Toronto Biennal of Art, KØS museum (Copenhagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal), the National Art Gallery (Ottawa). Solo exhibitions include Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Arsenal Contemporary (NYC) and Centre d’art international de Vassivière (France). Her work is included in numerous collections in North America as well as the permanent UNESCO collection in Paris. Her films have been programmed at film festivals such as TIFF, Sundance, Aesthetica (UK), Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2016, she was selected for the Cannes film Festival Cinéfondation residency in Paris. Monnet is recipient of the 2020 Pierre-Ayot award, the Merata Mita Fellowship of the Sundance Institute. She was recently named compagne des arts et des lettres du Québec. She is based in Montréal and is represented by Blouin-Division Gallery.