Caroline Monnet is a French-Canadian multidisciplinary artist who is known for her art installations and films with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
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Background
Monnet is a multi-disciplinary artist based out of Montreal Quebec Canada. She is a French Canadian artist who is known for her photography and art installations. Monnet is also known as a filmmaker with various films depicting her heritage as a person of European ancestry as well as First nations culture from her mother, a first nations woman of Algonquin descent from the Outaouais region of Quebec. Caroline Monnet is primarily a self-taught artist with no post-secondary training in art or filmmaking.
Education
Monnet has B.A in communications and sociology from the University of Ottawa and has studied at the University of Granada in Spain. She is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus and TIFF Talent Lab 2016.
Career
In 2015 Monnet released a short film named Mobilize which is a film using old footage from the national film board archives, the footage from the films included Cree Hunters of Mistassini, Cesar et son Can't D'Ercorce (Cesar's Birch Bark Canoe), and footage of Mohawk ironworkers, set to a score by Tanya Tagaq. Mobilize is a part of a four part series named "Souvenir" that includes three other filmmakers such as Kent Monkman, Michelle Latimer, Jeff Barnaby. She was nominated for a Canadian Screen Awards for Best Short Drama for Roberta (2014) and Best Short Documentary for Tshiuetin (2016). She won a Golden Sheaf Award at the Yorkton Film Festival for Best experimental film for Mobilize. She is currently developing with Microclimat Films her first feature film entitled Bootlegger, selected for both CineMart and Berlinale Co-Production Market 2016. She was the first Canadian filmmaker selected for the prestigious Cannes Film Festval's Cinefondation residency in Paris
As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), as part of Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin/Madrid), Axenéo7, Plug In ICA, Arsenal Montréal, Urban Shaman, McCord Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal) among others
Style
Monnet's style in her art is heavily influenced by First Nations culture in Canada mostly involving folklore, stories and cultural reference in her artwork and films. Monnet has made a signature for working with industrial materials, combining the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual-cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms.