sTudio process
Mining material in a sea of media images
Using found paper materials I use my scissors to slice through metal, wood and colour linking aesthetic formal qualities like line, shape and colour into new familial patterns and structures. Play and machine motion collide in my quasi-structures. Colour and shape push and pull through the designs as the forces of fluids, gravity, momentum and steam might. I employ the imagined methodologies of piecework and quiltmaking to the architectural, machine and dogmatic diagrammatic illustrations that I find.
Reinventing and upending the formality and authority of the diagram while tilting and crashing the 3D language of photography. These scrap-systems are neither collage, nor photography, painting nor sculpture.
~Hito Steyerl~
“The poor image is no longer about the real thing- the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. Its is about defiance and appropriation…”
Artist Bio
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 number of Canada Council for the Arts grants. She has gained national and international recognition for her animation shorts. 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. Monique currently works as a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design as well as providing instruction for Foundation Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University for the Entertainment Arts Program and the Wilson School of Design in Richmond & Vancouver, Canada.
Motut-Firth is a 3rd generation settler of mixed heritage, 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. 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.
