Entangled & Resurfacing Set
A follow up to her debut monograph Entangled (Deadbeat Club, 2020), Resurfacing furthers Maude Arsenault’s visual poetry with ongoing, honest exploration of the female experience. Time passes; family life fractures and splinters with it. Surfaces crack under a varnish of quiet and soft tones, as folds and crevasses are mirrors of an inner, newly reappropriated body.
Resurfacing is an essential extension of her work, translating the delicate and subdued power of her images into a tactile, textured design—giving amplitude and rhythm to Arsenault’s feminist visual language.
Entangled encapsulates a pivotal moment for Maude Arsenault’s work, representing a shift in perspective and personal responsibility. “After years dedicated to creating glorified images of women,” she says of her success in fashion photography, “I came to question my role and influence in the transmission of models of femininity.” Albeit informed by a progressive, non-binary upbringing, this introspection is ultimately necessary now – in the context of motherhood as she raises three children including a young woman. When speaking about Entangled, Arsenault invokes the French word carcan – meaning “ploy,” or “ambush,” or “ideological trap” – to explain the underlying motivation for making the spare and evocative pictures in this debut monograph. By which she means that becoming an adult and a parent have given her distance and perspective on the cultural demands made on the bodies and societal roles of young women, and particularly on life choices which have been constricted or even foreordained. Arsenault calls the work “a poem, an ode, a shout out,” and one senses that the quiet power of the book lies in contradictions still unresolved even as the author gains in experience and independence.
After several years behind the lens in the fashion world, Maude Arsenault, photographer, artist, mother and feminist, forks around 2015 towards the visual arts. Her work investigates the themes of female representation, private space, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach which oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and images documentaries. 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 body, in a perspective of self-determination for women.
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