Jeannette Sirois is a queer Canadian installation artist whose work investigates how institutions classify, regulate, and press upon the body. Working across large-scale drawing, text, video, sound, and installation, she treats portraiture not as likeness but as a site where lived presence encounters the systems that attempt to define it.
Grounded in drawing and extended through material intervention, Sirois' practice employs friction as methodology, creating moments and spaces where bureaucratic order meets embodied experience. Legal codes, medical classifications, religious language, administrative formats, and other institutional structures appear within her work as typography, data, objects, lighting, furniture, and spatial arrangements that shape how viewers encounter the body and the systems surrounding it.
Her work examines the production of legible and illegible subjects within contemporary society. Bureaucratic language and institutional aesthetics function not as ornament but as pressure, becoming records of the forces that shape queer and marginalized lives. Tables, forms, labels, files, and systems of display become both subject matter and material vocabulary, exposing the mechanisms through which authority is organized and experienced.
Across projects, Sirois reclaims the visual authority of portraiture while refusing its historical alignment with power. Monumental scale, frontal pose, and sustained acts of observation assert presence without spectacle, while typographic interventions, flattened space, and administrative forms mirror, resist, or rewrite institutional language.
Her drawings and installations are built through slow physical labour. Graphite, wax- and oil-based pencils, stone powders, pigments, text, sound, and moving image accumulate into surfaces and environments that hold both tenderness and constraint. The duration required to produce each work stands in deliberate contrast to the speed, abstraction, and presumed neutrality of bureaucratic systems.
Sirois' practice is driven by queer experience understood not as identity category but as lived knowledge: embodied, situated, and resistant to administrative simplification. Her work asks how bodies become visible, legible, and governable, and what forms of presence remain possible within systems designed to classify them.
