GENESIS BELANGER

Early Years

Genesis Belanger was born in 1978 in the United States. She initially studied photography and fashion design before receiving her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later earning an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Belanger lives and works in Brooklyn, where she maintains a studio practice focused on sculpture and installation.

Before fully dedicating herself to art, Belanger worked in commercial production, including prop styling for advertising campaigns. This background in object design and visual merchandising would later inform her artworks' uncanny materiality and psychological edge. The precise language of commodity display remains central to her practice today.

Artworks

Genesis Belanger's artworks are characterised by soft, pastel-toned sculptures rendered in porcelain, stoneware and upholstery foam, depicting familiar yet estranged objects—lipsticks, limbs, cigarettes, fruit—that float between humour and unease.

Early Sculptures and Domestic Fantasies

Genesis Belanger's early sculptures reimagine domestic life through the lens of surrealism and satire. In works like Holding Pattern (2018) and A Fortress of Order and Generosity (2019), she combines stylised limbs, trays of food, and everyday objects such as cigarettes or telephones into poetic tableaux. These ceramic artworks are meticulously handcrafted in soft pastel glazes, creating an inviting yet uncanny visual language. Influenced by mid-century advertising, they evoke a sanitised version of femininity, subverting traditional ideals of beauty, order and obedience. Beneath their glossy surface, Belanger's works question the psychological toll of domestic performance and gendered labour.

Figurative Furniture and Fragmented Bodies

Belanger's sculptures often take the form of anthropomorphic furniture or fragmented bodies, evoking a surrealist inheritance while grounding her work in contemporary critiques of identity and control. In Through the Eye of a Needle (2021), she transformed an entire gallery into a lounge-like setting filled with hybridised objects—chairs with lipstick legs, tables sprouting disembodied hands, and vases shaped like stylised torsos. These uncanny furnishings echo both corporate waiting rooms and private boudoirs, blurring the line between public and intimate space. Through such forms, Belanger highlights how the female body has historically been designed for display, subtly rearranged as decor and desire.

Subversion of Power and Desire

In artworks such as We Wake to the Smell of Sugar (2020), Belanger turns the language of branding against itself. Highly polished and seductively lit, these ceramic and fabric sculptures mimic the aesthetics of luxury advertising while embedding quiet acts of resistance. Curved arms extend from lamps, flowers spill out of mouths, and fingers clutch pills or sweets, suggesting the tension between pleasure and control. Her work interrogates how women's identities are shaped by consumption, desire, and pharmaceutical culture. These uncanny tableaux use humour and visual pleasure as a Trojan horse for deeper critiques of patriarchal and capitalist power structures.

Exhibitions

Genesis Belanger has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• We Were Never Friends, The Consortium Museum, Dijon (2021)
• Through the Eye of a Needle, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2020)
• Genesis Belanger, Académie Conti, Dijon (2020)
• Holding Pattern, New Museum, New York (2019)

Group Exhibitions

• Day Jobs, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2023)
• WOMEN, ARKEN Museum of Moderne Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2022)
• L'Almanach 20, Consortium Museum, Dijon (2020)
• Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2018)

Instagram

Genesis Belanger's Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Genesis Belanger's contemporary art practice has been featured in major publications including Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, and Wallpaper*.

FAQs

Ocula | 2025