About

Angie Arsenault is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice harnesses acts of deep noticing and a sensual engagement with the natural world.

Growing up immediately next to a notorious toxic waste site on the deindustrializing island of Unama'ki /Cape Breton, had a deep impact on Angie. Her work engages with concepts of value, ruination, trauma, storytelling, urban wilderness and the art of survival in late stage capitalism through social practice, interventions in the field, installation, botanical ink making, experimental printmaking and more.

She holds both a BFA (2004) and MFA (2017) from NSCAD University. She is a PhD candidate at Concordia University and is currently writing a play and her thesis The Pallet Shelter Meeting: Palimpsests of Deindustrial Trauma.

Artist Statement

Through my conceptually based installation practice I aim to ask questions such as how do people live in and with ruination? I mean this as a basic question of survival as well as a philosophical question.

The works that I have produced over the past ten years have dealt with concepts of labour, value, survival, resilience, resourcefulness and encouraging/nourishing a sensual engagement with the natural world. My exploration of these themes harnesses knowledge that would have been considered quite basic in the past, but is now relegated to the fringes, or specialized knowledge: foraging for food, medicine and pigments, canning and preserving, harvesting salt from sea water, etc.

I wish to encourage people to deeply consider what it is that we actually need to survive/thrive and to empower people to learn skills that will bring them into a closer commune with the earth that sustains us.

My work is a meditation on the precarity of living in a time of late capitalism that also asks the question: What does it take to survive/thrive in late capitalist ruins?

Angie Arsenault

Angie currently resides in unceded Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory.