Bio/Statement
Jeannette Sirois is a Canadian visual artist whose large-scale portraits investigate visibility, identity, and the systems that regulate, erase, or distort lived experience. Working through a practice she calls Friction Portraiture, her work foregrounds the body as a site of tension and resistance — where queer presence meets institutional power.
Her practice is grounded in drawing and expanded through text, sound, digital remapping, and material interventions. At the heart of her work is a commitment to queer histories—both personal and collective—as a counterforce to dominant narratives that have long silenced or pathologized queer lives.
Each series operates with its own visual logic, but consistently centres the human subject as a site of tension, resistance, and care. In select works, Sirois draws from the visual language of Grand Manner portraiture—monumental scale, frontal pose, symbolic structure—to reclaim a tradition historically used to depict state power. These elements are repurposed to honour lives pushed to the margins.
Personal objects replace aristocratic symbols; backgrounds are stripped of opulence and inscribed instead with carved or drawn text: legal codes, medical files, and institutional records. These bureaucratic fragments reference systems that have historically policed queer bodies and identities.
Her surfaces are built slowly, with graphite, black and white stone dusts, coloured pigments, and oil- and wax-based coloured pencils. Typography appears as wound, ghost, or pressure mark—debossed into the surface or layered as architectural presence. Digital remapping sometimes informs the drawing’s early structure, introducing subtle shifts that echo how queerness is shaped, obscured, or made illegible by institutional forces.
Each portrait functions as a micro-history: intimate, collaborative, and exacting. Together, these works form a visual archive of queer resilience—asserting not just presence, but the right to be seen on one’s own terms.
