Monique Motut-Firth is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer and arts educator working primarily in paper, paint and animation. Her current works investigate the use of collage and photomontage as critical strategies for exploring the role of technical images in knowledge production and cultural representation. The resulting scrap-systems link, layer and weave together disparate image cultures, eras and visual signifiers.
She is the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts 2021, Explore & Create grant. She has gained recognition for her animation shorts and has won awards from the SFU Small File Media Festival and the Cairo Video Festival in collaboration with sound artist prOphecy sun. In 2019, Motut-Firth was a finalist for the Georgia Straight & Capture Photography Festival Canada Line Competition and a finalist for the Vancouver Arts Society Emerging Artist Award, 2016. Her solo exhibition CONSUMED, Gallery 1515, was a Selected Exhibition for the Capture Photography Festival 2017. In 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta Canada, The Universe and Other Systems with Shary Boyle. A graduate from the MFA Visual Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She also holds a BFA from Emily Carr and a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia where she was awarded the Margaret Lawrence Scholarship for the Arts. Born into a distinctly mixed cultural heritage of French Roman Catholic and Russian Doukhobor, she developed a sense of critical curiosity surrounding pop-culture’s influence on cultural identity. Monique currently teaches Life Drawing for animation students in Vancouver, Canada.
Motut-Firth is a 3rd generation settler of mixed heritage, Russian Doukhobor and French Roman Catholic. She would like to acknowledge that she grew up in the shadow of St. Mary’s Mission Indian Residential School (1861-1984), on the ancestral and shared territory of the Stol:Lo people. She gratefully continues to live, work and play on the beautiful and unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh nations.
