Finding Myself at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Finding Myself at the Museum

This oil painting series began in 2016, in response to the preparations for the 150th mark of Canada’s settler Confederation. It is based on photographic references that I have gathered from my visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Appearing in casual poses in front of the paintings, my life-size body may look foreign to the landscape, perhaps tourist-like, seeming like I’ve lost something (or perhaps myself). With the inclusion of frames, cropped walls, and didactic panels, the paintings bring to attention the environment and larger context of art production and narrative-making for the nation. As a history of power, the museums’ paintings hold onto several Canadian myths, of terra nulius, of settler benevolence, of white supremacy. My figure comes into the frame as an interruption of the institution’s neutrality, and that of the original paintings.