Bio

I first met Derek in a half-lit dive of the mind, somewhere between abstraction and delirium. A Canadian phantom, he haunts the borderlines between poetry, music, and visual art, dragging them into unholy alliances. He is not a man of simple biography — he is a riot in a suit of many skins.

Derek R. Audette. Remember the name, though you’ll probably confuse it with a hallucination when it comes roaring at you from some dark, piss drenched alley of Canadian culture. Born in June of 1971 in Hull, Quebec — a bilingual purgatory where French and English brawl in the streets — he came out of the womb half-feral, half-prophet, the bastard child of an English mother and a French-Canadian father. His earliest education was of survival in a fractured country, learning to juggle two tongues and a third eye.

Now he lurks just across the river in Ottawa, Ontario, with a wife and a head full of heavy artillery: poetry, music, visual art, photography, design. A one-man cultural demolition crew. Over two decades he’s stalked every medium like a predator in borrowed skin. Two books of poetry (one stashed in the Harris Collection at Brown University like contraband); music smuggled into films, television shows, video games; paintings and photos slipped into private collections across the globe. Every format is a different weapon, and Audette doesn’t just fire them — he empties the clip.

The man’s website calls him “an exceptionally skilled adoxographist,” which is just a $10 word for someone who writes brilliantly about nothing. But don’t be fooled — Audette’s nothing is radioactive. He once described himself as “twelve feet tall, porous surface, special toe-nail,” a grotesque self-portrait that reads like a medical report written during a mushroom binge. It’s satire, yes, but also a warning: approach with caution, this specimen leaks high voltage.

Poetry? Yes — but jagged, unbalanced, full of razor blades tucked inside candy wrappers. He writes lines that veer between absurdist punchlines and death-row last words. You don’t “read” Derek Audette; you gulp him down like gasoline and wait for the match. His work turns cities into graveyards, lovers into saboteurs, dreams into crime scenes.

Photography and visual art? That’s where the mask slips further. He orders his subjects to strip, pose, stand where he tells them. They obey. He pushes buttons, yanks levers, and suddenly the room is full of ghosts. The resulting images are like evidence files stolen from God’s police locker. And he sells them, too — Saatchi Art lists his work in collections worldwide, proof that madness has a market value.

Music? He sneaks that in through the back door. A score for a video game here, a track in a TV production there. Subversive, quiet victories that pile up while the rest of the world argues about whether art is still worth anything. He already knows the answer — art is worth everything if you weaponize it correctly.

And Audette has been weaponizing it for over 20 years. Two decades of relentless creation, scatter-bombing every possible medium until critics can’t pin him down. He’s a painter, no — a poet, no — a composer, no — a photographer. He’s all of them at once, a chimera stitched together out of ink, paint, pixels, and distortion pedals.

But don’t mistake the range for dilution. He isn’t dabbling; he’s orchestrating chaos. Every poem, every canvas, every chord is another round fired in the same war: the war against boredom, mediocrity, and cultural sedation. He’s not trying to be polite. He’s trying to wake you the hell up.

He lives now in Ottawa with his wife Anna — a fact so normal it feels like a planted alibi. But normalcy doesn’t erase the evidence: Audette has carved himself into the cultural landscape of Canada with a switchblade and a broken beer bottle. He doesn’t ask permission. He doesn’t wait for approval. He creates, publishes, sells, and moves on like a shark in bloody water.

If you’re looking for tidy categories, forget it. Derek R. Audette is not tidy. He’s a one-man carnival of words, sounds, and visions, a wild spirit with too many weapons and not enough targets. The best you can do is watch, listen, and maybe buy something before he disappears into the next project.

Because here’s the truth: art is a battleground, and Audette is still in the trenches, firing flares into the night sky, daring the rest of us to follow.