Like ships in the night

An Exhibition by Caroline Monnet 
January 26 - May 6, 2018

Curated by Peta Rake

Walter Phillips Gallery, Main Space

Opening Reception
Friday January 26, 2018. 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Artist and Curator Talk
Saturday January 27, 2018. 2:00 p.m.

Exhibition Tour
February 14, 2018, 5:00 p.m. 

Art Break
March 13, 2018, 12 p.m.

Exhibition Tour
March 28, 2018, 5:00 p.m. 

Like ships in the night centres around a journey that Montreal-based, Algonquin artist and filmmaker Caroline Monnet took in the summer of 2012, where she boarded a ship docked at the Dutch port of Ijmuiden, on the coast west of Amsterdam. What ensued was a twenty-two-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, documented by the artist via handheld Mini DV. Growing up in Outaouais, Quebec, and in Brittany, France, the work draws upon her time spent on both sides of the ocean. The vessel eventually docked in Montreal, only to continue its journey through the Great Lakes region to Cleveland, to unload many tonnes of steel to make American cars.

The Atlantic Ocean, covering a fifth of the earth’s surface, has countless islands, encompasses a dozen seas and has an underwater mountain range that serves as the boundary of four tectonic plates. Its surface also becomes a marker of mountains and of our skies. This surface is a base line, a site at which one can begin. It marks time; in tides, and bodies, and wind. It surges like a warning, and is calm like a mood. It extends further north and south than we account for in our consciousness. It has its own codes, communiques, and relations. Its rise and fall is fraught, changing as the globe warms, and as we encroach and retract around its edges. It is farmed, spoken to, and imaged; has its own soundtrack, and its own dedicated library that charts its varied narratives. It has seen war, exchange, hope, greed, migration, longing, and plunder, and monstrous storms that eliminate any sense of a horizon.

Monnet’s film becomes a narrative for upending perspective, as well as for the transmission of information across impossible divides. Meditative, the film continually washes into itself and then retreats, an inkblot test made from our collective consciousness of this body of water. The imagery of the journey is dotted by markers of industry, refracted light, ships as shadows in the distance, and boiler rooms of infinite gauges; with Morse code and jamming radio signals providing a continuous backing track. Like ships in the night also features new concrete, text and copper works, as well as a triptych of photographs framed to destabilize the imagery’s horizon.

Drawn from the 1864 poem Tales of a Wayside Inn, the exhibition title speaks to a momentary union between two entities.^[2] More recently, the idiom has come to describe a missed connection between two people or communities; a divergent or transient relationship undone by interpersonal, geographic or cultural divides. Framed together, Monnet critiques the colonial, industrial and economic interchange between Canada and Europe as an indigenous woman. Like ships in the night speaks to the interconnectedness and the diversity of views that shape our place within the world, shedding light on the given historical and cultural complexities of our contemporary colonial context.

Caroline Monnet is the recipient of the 2017 Walter Phillips Gallery Indigenous Commission Award, created to support the commission of new work. 

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^[1] Amy Sherlock, “Sea Change: Our complex relationship to the world’s oceans,” Frieze, 2017. p. 52.
^[2] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1864, Tales of a Wayside Inn. University of Michigan. p 266.

Publication

Caroline Monnet – Heavy Material (2022)

Texts by Julie Nagam, Peta Rake, Guy Sioui Durand, and Stefan St-Laurent, with a Foreword by Jean-Michel Quirion and Jacqueline Bell 

Co-published by AXENÉO7 and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity 

Languages: French and English

Available in two versions:

Free downloadable PDF and limited-edition publication with concrete cover containing a signed and editioned multiple by Caroline Monnet

Price: $350.00 CAD plus applicable taxes 

A Closer Look (2022)
7” x 8”
Work on paper
Edition of 50

Co-published by AXENÉO7 and Walter Phillips Gallery, Caroline Monnet — Heavy Material is the first monograph on the Anishinaabe-French artist and filmmaker's work. The publication primarily focuses on Monnet’s first two major solo exhibitions, Standing in the shadow of the obvious curated by Stefan St-Laurent and presented at AXENÉO7 in 2016; and Like ships in the night curated by Peta Rake at Walter Phillips Gallery and presented in 2018. Featuring texts by Julie Nagam, Peta Rake, Guy Sioui Durand, and Stefan St-Laurent, the publication is available in two formats; a free, downloadable PDF version accessible on both institutions' websites and a limited-edition publication. The full-colour, hard copy version includes a specially-produced cover in concrete, as well as a removeable, signed and editioned artist multiple by Monnet in an edition of fifty copies.

PDF Available Here