Braxton Garneau: Antilles Lace
Braxton Garneau is a Canadian artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, traversing the intersections of material honesty and transformation. Drawing from classical European portraiture and Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions, Garneau creates portraits, shrines, and corporeal forms that explore diasporic and colonial histories rooted in his Trinidadian heritage. Antilles Lace, the artist’s first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, features a series of richly textured portraits using harvested and hand-processed materials such as raffia, and notably, asphalt, which has become a central medium in Garneau’s practice. Asphalt, a powerful, symbolic material linking Pitch Lake in Trinidad (home to his grandparents, and the world’s largest naturally exposed asphalt deposit) to Alberta’s oil sands (where his grandfather came to work in the 1960s), serves as a mutable metaphor for personal and collective identity. Applied in dense layers, the asphalt creates surfaces that feel at once ancient and industrial, fragile yet enduring. As Garneau’s figures emerge, they are adorned with symbols of spirituality, trade, and cultural continuity. Ground pearls and marble dust create a rich pigment which is meticulously hand painted to resemble lace, echoing the delicate, labor-intensive traditions where intricate lace weaving served as both adornment and a quiet assertion of cultural identity within colonial contexts. Taken together, Garneau’s work offers a powerful reflection on how materials carry stories, and how matter and memory can allow the past to surface in new forms.
