As an interdisciplinary artist, Genevieve Gaignard investigates personal histories, popular culture, and racial currents through her lens as a biracial woman navigating unsettling American realities.
Gaignard inserted herself into the work by mining her experiences and implementing soft color palettes, humor, and domesticity. Gaignard’s goal is to create environments and experiences that awaken critical thinking and offer a shift in perspective. Activating spaces with haunting nostalgia for America's past-as-present, she beckons viewers to dig into the imperfect relationship between our inner worlds, public lives, and modern events.
Each of the mediums Gaignard works with is a conduit for introspection. Her photographs are staged self-portraits presenting a spectrum of invented yet recognizable "selves," which undermine social hierarchies and beauty standards. Vintage wallpaper is a motif throughout her collage, sculpture, and installation work. This material, a childhood sentiment, serves as an accent or backdrop to the found objects and images she uses to assemble her work. In collages, she embraces xerography, a meditation of sifting through historical news media, magazines, and portraiture. Through sculpture and installation, Gaignard showcases antique furniture, decor and figurines reimagined into unexplored psychological spaces. Installation is her channel to create imagined domestic environments as sites of sanctuary and resistance. In doing so, she expands on the vernacular of found objects and settings found in her photography and collages. Sculpture allows Gaignard to reanimate the personifications of society's deference to Whiteness into symbols of objection. The scope of her work is an ensemble of visual renderings that affirms Black livelihood and provokes reflection on the often hostile realities of the outside world.
As the work evolves, Gaignard refines her focus on relationships; with herself, with family, friends, and lovers, and beyond. Gaignard creates work that functions as a pictorial diary, pulling from the archive of her personal photographs, her family archive, and contemporary found imagery.