Statement
Jeannette Sirois is a queer Canadian artist whose large-scale drawings examine how institutional systems classify, regulate, and press upon the body. Working through a practice she calls Friction Portraiture, she treats the portrait not as likeness but as a site where lived presence meets the architectures of control that attempt to define it.
Her work is grounded in drawing and extended through text and material intervention. She incorporates elements such as oil and wax pencils, graphite, inks and charcoal with further explorations using iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and carbon-based pigments—materials that echo the body’s composition of blood, bone, and tissue. Counter-legibility, Sirois’s core methodology, frames her inquiry into how universal human systems produce both legible and illegible subjects. Bureaucratic language, legal and medical codes, religious terminology, and other administrative formats appear within her portraits as flattened typography, shallow depth with no background, bureaucratic lighting and rigid tables. These textual structures function not as ornament but as pressure: the surface becomes a record of the forces that shape queer life.
Across series, Sirois reclaims the visual authority of classical portraiture while refusing its historical alignment with power. The monumental scale, frontal pose, and steady gaze of her sitters assert presence without spectacle. Backgrounds once reserved for wealth or prestige are replaced with fields of incised text and typographic interventions that mirror, resist, or rewrite institutional language. Material strata within each drawing reinforce the body as a site where classification is imposed and contested.
Her drawings are built through slow, physical labour—graphite, stone powders, pigments, and wax- and oil-based pencils forming surfaces that hold both tenderness and constraint.. The endurance required to produce each work stands in deliberate contrast to the speed and neutrality of bureaucratic systems.
Sirois’ practice is driven by a commitment to queer experience as lived knowledge. Her portraits function as counter-archives: records built through collaboration, care, and the refusal to allow institutional language to be the final narrative.
