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Digital Guide: Judy Chappus: Skin in the Game

Digital Guide: Judy Chappus: Skin in the Game

Curated by Emily McKibbon

March 26, 2026 – May 24, 2026

Judy Chappus is a Windsor-based artist and poet who is uncompromising in her artistic searching. This survey exhibition, ranging from Chappus’ student years to the present, captures a restless artist in the midst and aftermaths of many reckonings: with motherhood, shifting critical fortunes, aging, and climate change; others, too many to name. Animating all works on view is Chappus’ courage, a vital throughline connecting Chappus’ student work at the University of Windsor and the University of California at Irvine, through her return to Windsor, to the present.  

Chappus’ expansive, multimedia works reflect the artist’s Catholic upbringing, her exposure to feminist performance, and her longstanding interest in figuration and representation. More recently, installations and paintings address ecological issues, bringing together concerns around the Anthropocene and the histories of the places where Chappus lives and works. This includes Salt Spring Island, where Chappus was based for much of the pandemic and where she returns annually, and the Windsor region, where the Chappus family has resided since 1826. Collectively, the exhibition speaks to an artist who is sincerely and ferociously grappling with the issues of her time, with an eye for the outlaw and the courage to face difficult subjects. 

Skin in the Game is a tribute to the stakes of Chappus’ work, and the personal risks and vulnerabilities the artist takes and allows in its creation. A retrospective can be an invitation to make history of materials, to revisit old works, and to loom errant threads into a cohesive whole: to spread open the garden, and eat the juicy apples. 

Curated by Emily McKibbon

Installation photography by Frank Piccolo

spread open 
the garden 
eat the juicy apples 
and remember now 
the sun created 
women 
—Judy Chappus, History 

A painting of a nude woman seated in a chair, holding a Polaroid-style camera to her eye and taking a selfie in an oval mirror

Cool Pix Series, 2014

Acrylic on panel, Courtesy of the artist

In 1990, shortly after having her first child, Judy Chappus took a series of Polaroids of her postpartum body. They were meant to explore the physical changes brought about by pregnancy, postpartum and breastfeeding, and marked a return to the artist’s studio after a period of enforced absence. While Chappus intended to make art from them shortly after their making, the Polaroids lay fallow for nearly fifteen years. In 2004, Chappus returned to them to make a series of paintings.

Much of Chappus’ work contravenes how women are traditionally seen in art—as beautiful objects to be admired, as vulnerable subjects to be plundered, or as abject creatures to be pitied. This series of paintings reveals what is rarely seen in historical painting—the postpartum body—and the works celebrate its strength with keen-eyed honesty. The subject’s arms are strong, her belly soft, and her posture straight. This is a person who has done a remarkable thing, and the remove of fifteen years hasn’t reduced the Chappus’ respect for her subject—herself, at a critical moment as a woman, and as an artist.

Sacred Ground I, 1983

Mixed media collage on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

Sacred Ground I is the earliest work in this exhibition, dating back to Chappus’ student days at the University of Windsor. Compared to later works, such as Divine Order, distinct through-lines in Chappus’ practice emerge. Key among these are references to the church, reflecting Chappus’ early childhood in the Catholic faith. While Sacred Ground I is an abstract painting, it nonetheless demonstrates elements of Chappus’ gestural, gritty line work, and interest in collage as a graphic and editorial element.

An abstract painting with geometric elements. The only recognizable form is that of a cross.

Toys modified with paint and modeling clay to look evil, posed in a sinister group.

Post Apocalypse Toys, 2015

Plastic modelling clay and found objects. Included works from the Collection of Amy Chamberlain, Collection of Yvonne and Matt Chappus, Collection of Kendra Chappus Sikich, and the Collection of Sandy McKay. 

Chappus’ interest in pop culture is evident throughout Skin in the Game, including in her numerous collage works that remix elements of pop culture with art history. Post Apocalypse Toys are children’s toys modified to look like creatures who have outlived the Apocalypse, but at significant cost: rat-human hybrids, creatures with blinking eyeballs for heads, and monsters with asparagus for hands perform strange ceremonies. What emerges from these surreal assemblages is Chappus’ sense of humour, and her overriding belief that true liberation comes from abandoning restrictive social conventions. These creatures have survived the worst, and now is their time to celebrate.

Sabine Women, 2025

Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

Much of Chappus’ work critically examines how women have been portrayed in art throughout history. This painting, the Sabine Women, looks at the early Roman myth of the abduction of the women of Sabine in a mass bride kidnapping event.

The myth of the Sabine women—with all its sexual violence—has long been a popular subject in painting. In the upper right hand corner of this painting, Chappus recreates Nicolas Poussin’s 1634 rendering of the scene. This painting, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was inspired by Poussin’s education and travels through Rome, and the classical antiquities that he encountered there. The theme of kidnapping and rape was a popular classical theme, and Poussin would have encountered artistic interpretations of the attack on Helen by Paris, of Europa by Zeus, and Proserpina by Pluto, among others. Poussin’s use of this imagery was not necessarily a critique or condemnation of violence, but is an aesthetic experience meant to evoke a long foregone era.

Later artists, such as Picasso, returned to this theme as an allegory of violence, intended to critique contemporary life. Picasso’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1962) was a searing critique of the Cuban missile crisis, and the endless potential of violence inherent to the Cold War.

Chappus’ reinterpretation of this myth as painterly pastiche offers no such condemnation of contemporary life or politics. Instead, a question is raised around the adoption of rape and sexual violence as a metaphor or trope. What does it mean to collapse a lived form of violence into a symbolic device? And why must women, in art, be the passive recipients of male domination, and not proper actors in their own right? Over the surface of the painting, a series of gestural, scribbling marks intersect. Adapted from a drawing by her grandson, the artist presents a rejection of such narrow tropes, adopting the untrained gestures of a young boy. It’s a fascinating repudiation of a generations-long tradition, and a hopeful one.

A swirling, collaged painting combining elements from historic works by Picasso and Poussin, showing how the rape of the Sabine women has been presented in art history.

A queen-sized bedsheet with charcoal rubbings of tree bark on its surface. The bottom corner of the sheet is muddy, from when the rubbings were made.

Tree on Monmouth , 2026

Graphite rubbing. Courtesy of the artist

After moving to Salt Spring Island during the pandemic, Chappus’ work began to incorporate textural tree rubbings. Tree on Monmouth is one such composition, showing the rough bark of a single tree, captured in the spring of 2026 here in Windsor, Ontario. Other works show evidence of tree rubbings in their backgrounds, including Twilight Apparition and Salmon Run, both from 2022, when Chappus was living on the West Coast.

Altarpiece (Sanctified), 2022

Mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

When considered against the earliest works in this exhibition, Altarpiece (Sanctified) demonstrates a shift in how Chappus approaches the sacred in her practice. The woman in this portrait is otherworldly, with many arms and hands, one of them holding an anatomical heart, and the other a sacred heart. She is crowned and caped with a slug.

Tellingly, this sacred, mysterious figure is presented outdoors, in an old growth forest. She emerges from the forest and is distinctly of the forest, completely at one with the wilderness that surrounds her.

A nude woman with many hands, one holding an anatomical heart, and another holding a sacred heart. The figure is part otherworldly creature, and is imbued with a holy glow.

Judy Chappus

Judy is a Windsor based artist and uses photography, sculpture, video, painting and writing projects to share her life experiences. She is a founding member of the group, “The Exhibitionists”, and has been working with other woman and artists in the community since 2014 to create and exhibit figurative works with an emphasis on changing destructive cultural beliefs regarding woman, power and identity.  

In 2020 she wrote an independent book of poetry titled, Chop Shop, a book of poems about the neighbors. This publication is now part of the rare books collection in The Leddy Library at The University of Windsor. 

On Salt Spring Island in 2021-22 she photo-documented and produced drawings, prints and paintings for a poetry and art book searching for a process by which to best share her experience of that bio-eccentric landscape.  “Unfolding the Trees” is a series of life size graphite drawings on stretched linen embracing the notion of eco psychology by bathing the viewer in the magnificence, magnitude and bio diverse universe of trees. These works are meant to remedy our ever-fading connection with the natural world. She was one of four artists selected for The 2021 Salt Spring Mural Project and in 2022 she was a self-appointed artist in residence on Salt Spring Island resulting in a solo exhibition at The Salt Spring Gallery and a book of poetry both titled, “Understory”. 

“They held a hand over the cave wall and blew pigment around it wanting to connect to something larger than themselves, something beyond space and time, something elemental and eternal.” 

Chappus has an Honors BA in Fine Art from the University of Windsor, ON and a Masters Degree from the University of California, Irvine. 

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