Maude Arsenault - Entangled & Resurfacing Set

Maude Arsenault
Entangled & Resurfacing Set

Published by Deadbeat Club
Limited edition of 100 copies

This boxed set includes two books conceived together. The first chapter , Entangled, is completely out of print and has been reprinted for this special edition, allowing its purchaser access to this now rare book. Together with the second volume, Resurfacing , this set forms a profound narrative about the female experience.

Detailed presentation of the two works :

Following his first monograph, Entangled (Deadbeat Club, 2020) Resurfacing Maude Arsenault's visual poetry is deepened by a sincere and ongoing exploration of the female experience. Time passes; family life fractures and fragments with it. Surfaces crack beneath a varnish of soft, muted tones, the folds and crevices reflecting a newly reclaimed inner body. Resurfacing constitutes an essential extension of her work, translating the delicate and contained power of her images into a tactile and textured design, giving amplitude and rhythm to Arsenault's feminist visual language.

Entangled embodies a pivotal moment in Maude Arsenault's work, representing a shift in perspective and a taking of personal responsibility. "After years devoted to creating idealized images of women," she says of her success in fashion photography, "I came to question my role and influence in transmitting models of femininity." Although influenced by a progressive and non-binary upbringing, this introspection has proven essential, particularly in the context of motherhood, where she is raising three children, including a young woman. About Entangled Arsenault uses the French word " shackles "—which means "ruse," "ambush," or "ideological trap"—is used to explain the profound motivation behind the creation of the stark and evocative images in this first monograph. By this, she means that becoming an adult and a mother allowed her to step back and adopt a new perspective on the cultural demands imposed on the bodies and social roles of young women, and more specifically on the life choices that were constrained, even predetermined. Arsenault describes the work as "a poem, an ode, a cry," and one senses that the book's quiet strength lies in contradictions that remain unresolved, despite the author's growing experience and emancipation.

After several years behind the camera in the fashion world, Maude Arsenault, photographer, artist, mother, and feminist, turned to the visual arts around 2015. Her work explores themes of female representation, private space, domesticity, and intimacy through a photographic and material approach that oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes, and documentary images. She explores photographic and printed images, collage, sculpture, and installation. In doing so, her projects unfold bodies as spaces, including unexpected ones, from a perspective of female self-determination.