Mooniyang

Presented as part of Art on the Hour on Barclays Center’s Oculus

This digital work by Caroline Monnet unfolds as a sequence of shifting black-and-white patterns that continuously form, dissolve, and recombine across the Oculus screen. Built from a vocabulary of geometric shapes, the animation draws on Anishinaabe design motifs, translating them into a contemporary, time-based language.

Of Anishinaabe and French ancestry, Monnet often revisits forms of Indigenous knowledge through digital means, finding inspiration in Anishinaabe patterns found on regalia, textiles, birch bark baskets, and beadwork. As the composition evolves, the patterns suggest multiple readings at once: coded systems, architectural grids, or aerial maps of land divided and reorganized.

The title, Mooniyang - the Anishinaabemowin word for Montreal, where the artist lives and works - quietly anchors the work in language and place. For Monnet, these patterns also echo colonial divisions imposed by European settlers, where grids and partitions are layered over pre-existing Indigenous relationships to the land. In its cyclical motion, the animation becomes a meditation on pattern as a carrier of knowledge, reflecting how histories of land, identity, and movement remain encoded within contemporary visual culture.

About the Artist

Caroline Monnet (b. 1985, Ottawa, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and French ancestry, originally from the Outaouais region, who lives and works in Mooniyang/Montreal. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe. The artist has also exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Toronto Art Biennial (Canada), KØS Museum (Køge, Denmark), Musée d'art contemporain (Montréal, Canada), Baltimore Museum of Art (USA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA) and National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), among others. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America and at the Maison de l'UNESCO in Paris.