Chantal New (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist motivated by the intersections of art and social justice. Her expanded drawing practice takes form across sculptural installation, collage, photography, and the re-contextualizing of found objects. The diverse approaches are utilized to address issues ranging from the political to the aesthetic. She currently lives and works on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt) and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, colonially known as Victoria, BC.
The work of Chantal New is driven by a critical interest in hierarchical structures and institutions. Her expanded drawing practice takes form across sculptural installation, collage, photography, and the re-contextualizing of found objects. The diverse approaches are utilized to address issues ranging from the political to the aesthetic. Her most recent body of work is an inquiry into the powerful and complex nature of controlled visuality leveraged in systems of separation and punishment.
Functioning as singular components of a larger whole, drawings, photographic images, and three-dimensional objects are combined to explore themes of control and disconnection. Through strategies of fragmenting and combining, cropping and concealing, Chantal investigates both the visible and invisible barriers that permeate society.
Chantal’s subject is expressed in the gaps and deliberate omissions within her images, communicating through what is hidden or unseen, rather than through what is depicted. The viewer is limited to a glimpse, a small aperture, or an object without context. This practice of revealing and concealing emphasizes the ways in which control over what is seen can both uphold dominant power structures or offer a point of resistance.
In work that is minimal yet emotionally charged, Chantal highlights the unjust hierarchies that persist at the core of social structures that surround us. Using both a representational and conceptual approach, her work reveals how our vision is ‘clouded’ in the everyday and at a systemic level.