About

Angie is an artist and researcher originally from the East Coast, currently living in Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary practice incorporates storytelling, deep noticing, and a sensual engagement with the natural world. Angie has a keen interest in the concept of urban wilderness and the ways in which humans interact with non-human worlds. She grew up next to the second biggest toxic waste site in North America and this experience had a large impact on the lens through which she views the world.

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.

I wish to encourage people to deeply consider what it is that we actually need to survive/thrive and to offer encounters that provide an opportunity for gentle engagement 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 lives on the unceded territory of the Anishinàbe Algonquin Nation.