After several years behind the lens in the fashion world, Maude Arsenault, artist, mother and feminist, forked around 2015, towards the visual arts. Her work invests the themes of female representation, private spaces, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach that oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and documentary images. She explores from the photographic and printed image, collage, sculpture, and installation. In doing so, her projects deploy bodies as spaces and unexpected spaces of the bodies, in a perspective of self-determination for women.
Arsenault holds a degree in art history and a M.A. in Visual Arts from UQAM, Montreal. She is the recipient of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Arts (2023), Yvonne L. Bombardier Visual Arts Scholarships (2021) and has received several grants from Quebec and Canada Councils for the Arts. The artist won the international Hariban Grand Prize in Japan (2020) where she was selected by Lucy Gallun (MoMA NY), Emma Bowkett (FT Magazine, UK), and Felix Hoffman (C/O Berlin Museum). Arsenault has exhibited solo and collective projects in Canada, France, USA, Latin America and Japan. She has published two acclaimed photobooks, Entangled (2020) and Resurfacing (2023) with L.A. publisher Deadbeat Club Press.
Maude Arsenault's residency at NARS is made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts.
