Artistic Practice
I work with the lens as an instrument of celebration, carving free what endures, what resists erasure
Artistic Practice
Christina Marie Comeau is a Canadian photographer and printmaker working at the intersection of documentary inquiry and fine-art practice. Her work examines how resilience, continuity, and care are enacted within less visible environments and working lives, contexts that sustain time-honoured, quietly effective responses to social and ecological uncertainty. Comeau focuses on sites of cultural exchange, relational labour, and community cohesion, engaging urban, rural, and industrial ecosystems through sustained, place-based inquiry.
Artistic Approach and Medium
Comeau works primarily in monochrome, producing carbon-based ink and platinum–palladium prints as a research-creation methodology rather than an aesthetic reduction. strategy that privileges perception, duration, and material inquiry over chromatic description. By setting aside the semantic immediacy and volatility of colour, her photographs become orchestrations of tonal relationships and material presence through which meaning is gradually disclosed. This disciplined visual language slows the act of seeing, allowing complexity to emerge through restraint rather than accumulation.
Her approach resonates with the perceptual discipline and quiet tension found in the magical realism of Canadian painters such as Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt, where ordinary scenes are rendered as sites of heightened awareness rather than spectacle. Through monochrome, the photograph becomes an instrument of inquiry, inviting reflection, interpretive pause, and the emergence of alternative understandings grounded in lived experience.
Artistic Focus and Current Work
Comeau’s practice privileges sustained engagement and ethical representation over event-driven imagery. At its core is an ongoing inquiry into Resistance to Erasure. A thematic framework shaped by her Acadian ancestry and histories of displacement, continuity, and perseverance. She attends to the tension between built environments and the vastness of organic reality, observing how working spaces and habitual gestures that structure community life are held within broader ecological rhythms of land, sky, and ocean.
Selection to the Canadian Forces Artist Program (2026–2027) extends this inquiry by situating her practice within institutional and national systems of service. The program provides access to environments where resilience, duty, interdependence, and coordinated action are enacted under conditions of uncertainty. Through a lens of systemic magical realism, this engagement parallels her doctoral research in cybernetics and societal systems change, offering an empirical site for examining structured organizational ecologies.
The prints emerging from her practice function as a deliberate counterpoint to cultural amnesia and ecological abstraction. They seek to preserve not only what is depicted, but the conditions of attentiveness through which sustainability becomes perceptible locally, relationally, and with a deeply poetic persistence.
Professional Recognition
Canadian Forces Artist Program (CFAP) - Selected Artist, Group 12 Cohort (2026–2027)
Department of National Defence, Government of Canada
Department of National Defence, Government of Canada
Juried national program supporting the creation of new work responding to the experiences of the Canadian Armed Forces
Exhibitions
Four Corners: Group Exhibition, SPAO Gallery, Ottawa, November 2026
Resistance to Erasure: Group Exhibition, Passage Gallery, Ottawa, February-April 2026
Continental Fragments: Group Exhibition, La Petite Mort Gallery, Ottawa, Canada, 2010
Publication
Publication in Sentinel magazine, the National Magazine of the Canadian Forces, 1992
Collections
Prints held in private collections
Photographic Training
2021 Piezography Printmaking and Digital Negative development, Cone Editions, Vermont, USA
2023 Platinum-Palladium Printing, Malde-Ware method, Cone Editions, Vermont, USA
2024 Masterclass with Pradip Malde, co-inventor of the Malde-Ware platinum-palladium printing-out method
2025 Project Development, School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa
2026 Artist-in-Residence, School of Photographic Arts, Ottawa
Education
2020 Master of Arts in Leadership, Royal Roads University
2023 PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo, School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability