Artist Monika Napier investigates the overlooked accoutrements of everyday living. In mad, mad, mad, mad world, she has hyperbolized the physical properties of extension cords, erased their utilitarian qualities and transformed them into quizzical objects. Look how the orange cords have been coiled into slouching, leaden nests, or how the blue cords have the feel of an invasive vine, or how easily the huge braided yellow cord leads us simultaneously into fable and economic critique. Napier’s work recharges speculation, and invites us to reconsider the spatial qualities of technology and our firmly held values of consumption and material entitlement. Monika Napier welcomes us into a pleasurably unsettling place, our place, a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Napier handles a broad range of media with astonishing technical skill. Her installations and objects are shaped by a carefully configured conceptual framework. The resulting imagery is exquisite, pernickety, and persists vividly in memory and imagination.

Monika Napier received a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1988, a Diploma from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1992 and a MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1998. Monika Napier has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for the past twelve years. She has taught at the University of Saskatchewan and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Monika Napier lives and works in Montreal.

Helen Marzolf and Brenda Barry Byrne
Curators