Geneviève Cadieux (born in 1955) lives and works in Montreal. She is perhaps best known, at least to Montrealers, through the large installations of red lips La Voie Lactée (Milky Way, 1992) atop that city's contemporary art museum. However, she became internationally known through her mainly photo-based art shown at the Venice Biennale of 1990 where she represented Canada, and through numerous solo and group exhibitions in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

During the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, Cadieux's art focused on the body, often fragmenting it while showing close-ups with which she raised questions concerning the (our) construction of the body as physical entity, mental space and/or body image. In the 1995 installation, Broken Memory (acquired by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 2000), sound was incorporated. Recorded are the body's noises of emotional and physical pain, an audible anguish that becomes almost unbearable due to its familiarity. The pain of Broken Memory was made visible in Cadieux's Artist Project Vague (1997), included in Parachute 90, April-June 1998. More recent work deals physically and conceptually with spatial issues that exist between individuals. In an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Spring 2000), large scale photographs of single human figures, a woman and a man, were shown. Each reached into the photographic space next to her/him through an outstretched arm/embrace. Yet, the gestures appeared to be reaching into void for they could solicit no reactions. With the Montreal exhibition, Cadieux introduced a new aspect within her oeuvre: video and (brief) spoken dialogue. In the video Paramour (1998/99), a woman - in Cadieux's habitual over-life-size proportions - is projected against the back wall of a room. As she looks at the spectator, she directs a question to an invisible man: "Have you ever loved a woman?" He answers "never." The woman continues: "Not once?" Again he replies "jamais!" The spoken dialogue is recorded in French and English.

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