Artist Statement

By dismantling images and words taken from personal family albums and videos, the artist reconstitutes in performance and material objects snippets of her history. Segmented and semi-reconstituted, these bits of memories, both humorous and melancholic, are woven into one.

Arsenault also questions the narratives and perspectives inherited from others. She adopts these anecdotes imbuing them within her personal folklore. From the real and the imagined, she creates intersections and transforms the story. As memory is necessarily distanced from lived reality, she questions the importance of biographical veracity in self-conception. Using myth, parable, and metaphor, she constructs autobiographical installations that go beyond the margins of chronological narration.

The questioning of memory, its capacity for veracity, or its unconscious distortions is at the heart of her research. By discerning the space that exists between truth and falsity, she attempts to capture the moment when the imaginary is redefined as veritas within the brain.