Digital Guide: Kissing Cousins: New Acquisitions in Context

Kristine Moran, In Search, 2021, Oil, acrylic on linen, Gift of the artist, 2025

Prudence Heward, Femme au bord de la mer, 1930, oil on canvas, 106.0 cm x 162.0 cm, Purchase, 1974

Prudence Heward’s The Bather (c. 1930) and Kristine Moran’s Madcap Swimmers (2017-present) showcase the evolution of women’s representation throughout Canadian art over the last century.

While both depict female figures associated with swimming, their approaches diverge and represent their distinct historical and aesthetic contexts. In comparison to Moran’s Madcap Swimmers, The Bather’s figure is depicted not in motion but in a moment of static, contemplative rest. Her non-idealized body and direct gaze were radical for the time and caused unease among viewers, highlighting Heward’s subversion of feminine stereotypes and cementing The Bather as an important artwork of early 20th-century Canadian modernism. In contrast, Moran’s swimmers and representations of the female figure are dynamic and often abstract. The women form a collective, and their sport is a metaphor for persistence, reflecting a more modern, conceptual art practice.

Both artists, however, complicate what women are shown doing in the Canadian art landscape. Heward’s artwork laid the groundwork for Moran’s exploration, catalyzing a shift in the depiction of women in Canadian art from decorative muses to real, thinking individuals. Moran builds on this idea, showing female identity not as a single, solid form, but as something fluid, collective, and constantly in motion. Together, these paintings demonstrate the trajectory of female representation in Canadian art.

Krystal Bigsky, Pihkonâkwan Oskisikow (He has Grey Eyes), 2025, Brain-tanned moosehide, size 11 beads, true cuts, sinew, found hockey stick, Commissioned by Art Windsor-Essex, 2025 

Greg Curnoe, Hockey Stick Blades from West Lions Park, London (from the Toronto 20 portfolio), 1965, Relief print from hockey stick blades, with rubber stamp, on paper, Gift of the Director’s Fund, 1965 

On the surface, Krystal Bigsky’s Pihkonâkwan Oskisikow (He has Grey Eyes) and Greg Curnoe’s Hockey Stick Blades from West Lions Park, London might seem to share little more than a connection to Canada’s national sport. Yet, both artists transform the hockey stick into a powerful symbol of identity, community and storytelling.

Curnoe, a leading figure of the London Regionalism movement in the 2960s, celebrated the rhythms of everyday Canadian life. In Hockey Stick Blades from West Lions Park, he used real blades to make bold, abstract prints. Through bright colours and simple forms, he turned a familiar object into art that reflected his love for sport, local culture, and the do-it-yourself spirit of his hometown. His playful use of material invites viewers to see beauty in the ordinary.

Sixty years later, Bigsky’s Pihkonâkwan Oskisikow reclaims the same object through an Indigenous lens. Made from a found hockey stick wrapped in brain-tanned moosehide, sinew, and delicate beadwork, the piece honours her late brother, a hockey player called “Grey Eyes.” Each stitch is a form of remembrance, linking family, land, and cultural tradition. Where Curnoe captured regional pride, Bigsky transforms that pride into a story of healing, resilience, and Indigenous presence.

Together, these works bridge eras and perspectives – one grounded in local life, the other in cultural memory – showing how everyday objects can carry histories, identities, and love across generations.

Isabel McLaughlin, Nipissing Mine, Cobalt, Ontario, ca. 1931, oil on board, 42.0 cm x 31.0 cm, Purchase, 2013

Robert Burley, The Disappearance of Darkness, portfolio photographed 2005-2011, printed 2013, pigment print (inkjet). Gift of Howard and Carole Tanenbaum, 2024

Robert Burley’s The Disappearance of Darkness (2005–2013) and Isabel McLaughlin’s Nipissing Mine, Cobalt (1931) both depict the end of an industry, but their works differ in historical perspective, tone, and methodology.

McLaughlin’s 1931 painting presents a depleted silver mine through the clean, geometric forms of early Canadian modernism and reflects a somber observation of a dying industry due to the economic realities of the Great Depression. Similarly, Burley’s photographs employ the precise, perspectival control of architectural photography to frame the decaying factories of the analog film industry through the demolished Building 13 of Kodak Canada.

A major difference lies in their temporal and critical stance. McLaughlin’s work is a quiet observation of industrial decline, typical of early Canadian modernism. Burley’s series, however, acts as a deliberate “scan” of the industry, showcasing people in his images and pointing to the socio-economic and environmental impacts of technological change. While McLaughlin memorializes a past industry, Burley critically examines the remains of a recently vanished one.

Another divergence lies in Burley’s conceptual use of his medium. Burley’s use of a film camera to document the end of film production is particularly notable. This approach transforms the project from documentation into a self-referential work as each photograph is made using the very technology whose manufacturing infrastructure is being erased. This creates a powerful paradox as the film medium is capturing the death of its own means of production.

Sylvia Matas, from Between Then And Now, 2017, graphite on paper. Gift of the artist, 2025. 2025.05.002

Caven Atkins, Snow Scene from My Window, Walnut Street, 1930, oil on Masonite, Gift of the artist in memory of his wife, May Pepper Atkins, 1990, 1990.013

Both Caven Atkins and Sylvia Matas approach the act of looking and recording land in fundamentally different ways. Their works reveal how landscapes are not only seen but also remembered, imagined, and emotionally inhabited.

Working in postwar Canada, Caven Atkins approached land through observational drawing. His images of rural, industrial, and domestic scenes reflect a moment when the landscape was seen as legible and grounded, a place that provided a stable foundation for national identity. These representations, while not overtly or intentionally political, emerge from a period when landscape art supported settler-colonial narratives of wilderness, progress, and rightful occupation. In this context, the ordinary homes, trees and other markers of Canadian landscape in Atkins’ drawings appear calm and inevitable. This imagery reinforces the naturalization of European presence on land that was never freely given. The visual quiet of his work carries with it a deeper, unspoken history. A history of displacement and uneven belonging.

Atkins’ work offers an opportunity to reflect on how drawing and documentation have historically shaped how Canadians see the land, and whose perspectives have been made visible (or absent) in those representations.

Here in the 21st century, Sylvia Matas offers a very different kind of landscape. Matas’ landscapes are shaped by fragmentation, memory, and psychological unease. In her Between Then and Now series, sparse graphite drawings suggest landscapes that feel suspended between presence and absence. Her forms often resemble uncanny traces of dwellings, reducing them to their most essential shape–producing a simultaneous feeling of familiarity and estrangement. These minimal, haunting structures disrupt the assumption that the single-family home is a neutral or natural feature of the landscape. Instead, Matas exposes its emotional weight, cultural specificity, and historical context.

Matas’ practice signals a broader shift in how contemporary artists approach landscape, not as a fixed or knowable backdrop, but as a space shaped by ambiguity, subjectivity, and emotional resonance. In contrast to Atkins, who renders the visible world with clarity and compositional control, Matas turns toward what evades perception–fleeting impressions, fractured memories, and the uncertain edges of experience. Her work foregrounds what lies just outside the frame, suggesting that absence can be as meaningful as presence.

Atkins and Matas offer distinct but complementary visions of how land is not only seen, but interpreted. Their work reminds us that to “record: the land is never a neutral act, instead it involves choices about what to include, what to obscure, and what cannot be fully captured. Through observation or suggestion, precision or erasure, both artists reveal how deeply our understanding of place is shaped by the way we look.

Catherine Heard, Untitled (Men will never feel like women…), 1993 – 2006, hair, glass, frame, Gift of the artist, 2024, 2024.06.001

Mary Wrinch, Young Woman with Bonnet (Miss Alice Carter?), 1910, watercolour on ivory, Gift of Joan and W. Ross Murray, 1983, 1983.019

At first, Catherine Heard and Mary Wrinch’s art looks very different. Heard’s work uses unusual materials to invite people to think about society’s discomfort with women and the unconscious mind, hoping to draw attention to these issues and how they still affect us today. These works show how women’s bodies were often seen as imperfect versions of men’s bodies, and she wants viewers to face these troubling ideas. 

Mary Wrinch (1877–1969) was a Canadian artist who worked in Toronto in the early twentieth century. She painted tiny portraits on ivory, and these helped her earn money so she could travel outside of Toronto and paint Canadian landscapes. By making a living as an artist, Wrinch broke social conventions for women. However, her small portraits still followed the social expectations of her time, enforcing the social order and gender divisions of the day. 

Heard’s art uses materials and methods from Wrinch’s era to challenge these ideas about gender. Throughout history, people used human hair in crafts, especially in memorial works from the Middle Ages up to the early 1900s. Hairwork was most popular during the Victorian period, when Queen Victoria’s long mourning period for her husband popularized memorial art. The long, twisted strands of hair in Heard’s piece are meant to make people feel uneasy, and amplify the discomfort behind J. G. Spurzheim’s sexist quote and the medical imagery on the silk wall hanging. 

It’s interesting that in the early 1900s, neither Heard’s use of human hair nor Wrinch’s ivory miniatures would have seemed unusual. Today, people rarely use human hair in crafts or in artwork, and the sale of elephant ivory is now illegal in Canada. Bringing these two artists together shows how gender can be both enforced and challenged by visual artists, and how the materials they use impact the public reception of their work. This comparison also quietly shows how women artists are connected across generations. Wrinch’s modest works helped make it possible for women to take part in art, paving the way for artists like Heard to make challenging and sometimes controversial art. 

Lawren Stewart Harris, Lake Superior Sketch LI, circa 1923, oil on panel. Gift from the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, 1970, 1970.043

Jon Sasaki, Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by Lawren Harris, 2020, inkjet print. Purchase, 2024, 2024.08.001

Light, energy, and transformation connect the practices of Lawren Harris and Jon Sasaki, two artists separated by nearly a century but united in their search for what lies beyond the visible.

In Lake Superior Sketch LI, Harris paints the northern landscape as something real and spiritual. Bands of light slice through dark clouds, revealing water and sky charged with a quiet, almost otherworldly force. As a member of the Group of Seven and a devoted Theosophist, Harris believed that nature was infused with a “spark of the divine.” His simplified forms and glowing horizons invite viewers to see the land as sacred, alive, and radiant with unseen energy.

Jon Sasaki approaches this same spirit of inquiry through science rather than painting. For his 2020 work Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by Lawren Harris, Sasaki collected bacterial traces from Harris’s original painting tools, cultivating them in petri dishes and photographing the resulting growths. The images recall miniature landscapes – tiny worlds echoing Harris’s light-filled scenes, suggesting that everyday life is subsumed with magic—even if that magic is microbial, rather than otherworldly.

Together, these works bridge two ways of seeking: Harris looks outward to vast horizons for spiritual truth, while Sasaki looks inward to microscopic ecosystems for traces of the same vitality. Both remind us that art is not static, it caries forward the energy, touch, and imagination of those who came before.

James Kerr-Lawson, Portrait of Alice and Louise Cummings (Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory), circa 1885, oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William and Rochelle Tepperman, 1978, 1978.031

Adad Hannah, Two Musicians, 2007 – 2010, HD video (7 minutes, 20 seconds), with conservation box and HD master. Gift of Leon Liffmann, 2020, 2020.010

James Kerr-Lawson (1862–1939) was a Canadian-born painter, muralist, and designer who spent most of his professional life in Britain, where he’s often associated with the later phases of the British Arts and Crafts movement and with early 20th-century mural painting. Portrait of Alice and Louise Cummings (Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory) shows two young women in a quiet and intimate domestic scene. One is practicing piano while the other rests her weight on the instrument, perhaps singing from sheet music in her hands.

Adad Hannah is a contemporary multimedia artist primarily working in video, photography, installation, and performance. He stages video-recorded tableaux vivants, or performances in which people pose very still, like living photographs. These videos explore the intersection between photography, video and sculpture in moving and often humorous ways. Two Musicians appears first to be a photograph of a musical performance, but on closer inspection the slight movements of the musicians reveal the artificiality of the scene.

Both Kerr-Lawson’s and Hannah’s work directly engages with the legacies of lens-based practice. While Hannah’s playful work more clearly operates in the space between photography and video, Kerr-Lawson’s painting begins to show us how photography influenced painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kerr-Lawson’s off-centre painting owes a debt to photography, with its unusual framing of its two subjects off-kilter, with the length of carpet exaggerated in the foreground. The casualness of the scene—the messy bookcase, the casual lean of the singing woman—reflects the influence of domestic photography and the “snapshot” aesthetic, which influenced painters from the Impressionist period onwards.

Patricia Deadman, Small Contemplation, 1988, colour photo with mixed media. Gift of the Estate of Patricia Deadman, 2025

Patricia Deadman, Two Tots, 1988, colour photo with mixed media. Gift of the Estate of Patricia Deadman, 2025

Betty Goodwin, Untitled (Not high but high enough…) No.1, 1995, graphite and oil stick over gelatin silver print on translucent Mylar film. Purchased with funds from the Estate of Anna Marie Gravenor, her friends and anonymous donors, 1998, 1998.004

Memory, loss, and renewal link the works of Patricia Deadman and Betty Goodwin, two artists who use the body and photographic image as spaces for emotional and spiritual reflection.

Patricia Deadman’s Small Contemplation and Two Tots blend photography with hand-applied marks, creating dreamlike images that blur the boundary between photograph and painting. In both, the human form emerges through layers of colour and gesture, suggesting moments of care and kinship. Deadman, of Tuscarora and European ancestry, often explored intergenerational memory and the passage of time, combining family photographs with painterly surface treatments. Her works recall both the fragility and endurance of cultural identity, using gestures and light to evoke what cannot be seen directly – the feelings that linger between presence and absence.

Betty Goodwin’s Untitled (Not high but high enough…) shares this sense of vulnerability but through a more visceral lens. Using graphite and oil stick over a gelatin silver print on translucent Mylar, Goodwin created an image of the body suspended between earth and air. The title’s phrase, drawn across the surface, reads like a breath, simultaneously hopeful and exhausted. A self-taught Montreal artist, Goodwin’s work often examined the traces left by human experience: scars, imprints, and moments of transformation.

Together, Deadman and Goodwin confront the weight of memory and the resilience of spirit. Deadman’s gentle overlays and Goodwin’s raw, bodily gestures show two approaches to healing through art, one tender and meditative, the other physical and searching, each transforming loss into a quiet form of endurance.

Bobs Cogill Haworth, Cansos, Alliford Bay, 1943, gouache on paper. Purchase, 1993, 1993.038

Janet Jones, Black Holes (Berlin), 2022, print, acrylic, and gouache on canvas. Gift of the artist, 2024, with thanks to JLG, 2024.07.001

At first glance, the works of Bobs Cogill Haworth and Janet Jones may seem worlds apart. Haworth’s Cansos, Alliford Bay (1943) is a gouache-on-paper depiction of military aircraft stationed along the Canadian coast. This work is a grounded, observational image of wartime infrastructure in Canada at the time. In contrast, Janet Jones’ Black Hole (2022) is a sleek, abstract painting made up of ring-like forms and hard edges geometries, evoking technological precision and quiet unease. Though formally distinct and separated by generations, these works are connected by shared concerns with surveillance, militarization, and systems of control. Both artists position themselves as cultural observers–they are alert to the shifting dynamics of power–and commit themselves to responding through their work. In this way, they reflect the idea of the artist as a kind of early warning system.  

Bobs Cogill Haworth was one of Canada’s many war artists, and was comissioned to document the war effort during World War II. She worked on the home front, depicting aircraft like the Cansos stationed along Canada’s East Coast, an area that became a key site for air and naval defense. While she “did her job” with discipline and skill, her position as a woman in a male-dominated wartime infrastructure added a layer of complexity to her work. Haworth’s painting captures the calm before moments of conflict: the planes are grounded, the landscape is quiet, but a sense of unease hovers in the sky. The imagery contributes to a wartime archive shaped by a deep sense of observation, responsibility, and containment.  

Janet Jones takes this tension into a new era. Her painting Black Hole offers no direct visual cues of military aircraft or geographic specificity, yet the feeling is eerily similar. The concentric forms recall satellite dishes, radar systems, aerial targets, and the grid-based logic of surveillance architecture. Influenced by the work of Paul Klee and early modernist abstraction, Jones uses a minimalist visual language to speak to a deeply technologized and increasingly militarized world. Her work is rooted in urban experience, being a woman in the city, navigating systems of oversight, control, and silent threat.  

Where Haworth bore witness to the militarization of the Canadian landscape in the 1940s, Jones grapples with the creeping militarization of “near space,” and the act of establishing in orbital zones. In both cases, the artist stands at a threshold. The ground meeting the air, the real world merging with abstract systems of power. If Haworth painted under the shadow of fascism in Europe, Jones reflects a parallel moment of rising technocracy, authoritarian surveillance, and what some have called a neo-fascist aesthetic. Both artists inherit a tradition of avant-garde resistance, albeit in different ways. 

Paterson Ewen, Pink Moon, 1986, oil on gouged plywood panel. Gift of James Smith, 2004, 2004.008

John Scott, Score, circa 2012, acrylic, ink on canvas. Gift of Matthew Varey, 2025, 2025.02.001

These two paintings of moons—Earth’s and Mars’—highlight how these celestial bodies continue to hold inspiration for Canadian artists. 

The moon is one of the most enduring subjects in Paterson Ewen’s (1925-2002) late works. Ewen experienced mental health issues through much of his life, and believed that there was a direct relationship between the various phases of the moon and his depression. Pink Moon shows the moon at its fullest, when Ewen believed he struggled most.  

In contrast, John Scott’s Score is a highly intimate portrait of the artwork donor’s wife, Maria, floating in zero gravity on Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons. The work was a gift from the artist to the Varey’s, made in recognition of both the artist’s and Maria’s experiences with disability: Maria, who had Multiple Sclerosis, and Scott, who had severe osteoporosis. Phobos has 1/1,000th of the gravitational pull of earth, and there a person weighing 150 pounds would weigh two ounces. Consequently, Maria is presented as weightless and smiling, tethered to the surface of the moon only by a cord.   

Both Paterson, who died in 2002, and Scott, who died in 2022, were known by their contemporaries for their ability to transcend significant health challenges in the creation of their monumental works. In both these works, the moon is both subject and metaphor, relaying complex ideas around mental health and disability. 

Arthur Shilling, Indian Boy, 1969, oil on canvas. Gift of Dr. Wayne Carman, 2019, 2019.002

Arthur Shilling, Sleeping Child #2, 1981, pencil on paper. Purchased with support from the Harbinger Foundation in memory of their founder, Joan VanDuzer, 2025. 2025-02.001

Arthur Shilling’s Indian Boy (1969) and Sleeping Child #2 (1981) together trace the artistic and personal journey of one of Canada’s most important Indigenous painters. Born on the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, Shilling was largely self-taught, later studying at the Ontario College of Art. His early work, including Indian Boy, demonstrates the influence of European masters like Cézanne and Van Gogh, visible in short, energetic brushstrokes and bright, impressionistic colour. Painted when he was just twenty-eight, the work captures a young figure surrounded by thick, living brushwork, expressing both innocence and vitality. It reflects a period when Shilling was developing his visual language, still grounded in Western art traditions while beginning to shape his own distinct voice.

More than a decade later, after surviving major heart surgery in 1975, Shilling’s focus shifted toward the spiritual and emotional strength of his community. Sleeping Child #2 (1981) belongs to this mature period, when his line work grew more expressive and his subjects more introspective. Drawing on Anishinaabe teachings and portraiture, Shilling portrayed children – often his own sons, relatives, or members of Rama First Nation – as symbols of renewal and hope. He once said, “I painted because there is no other way to express the beauty of my people.”

Seen together, these two works chart a transformation, from a young artist inspired by European styles to a master who drew strength from his own culture and community. Shilling’s art evolved from observation to affirmation, turning paint and pencil into acts of love, resilience, and Indigenous pride.

A note about the title: AWE staff are currently trying to determine the identity of the young boy in the painting, and until we are able to do so, we will continue to use Shilling’s original title for this work. In certain cases, AWE curators choose to change the title of an artwork if the title is outdated or offensive, but we generally try to maintain the original titles when they were chosen by the artist. Shilling was actively showing his work by 1969, with solo exhibitions at the Blue Easel gallery in Toronto (1966); the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (1966); the Well Gallery, Ottawa (1967); and TMAG, Owen Sound (1967). For this reason, it is likely that it was Shilling who titled this work, rather than any previous gallerists, curators, or owners.

Richard Storms and Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) are both accomplished painters, working at the remove of eighty years. Storms’ portraits of dogs, and Lewis’ portraits of the Basilian Fathers share formal resembles, in part because of their debt to modernist portraiture.  

Wyndham Lewis was a Canadian-born British artist and writer, and close friend of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. The paintings on view were made during the artist’s brief residency in Windsor during World War II, when he left London to avoid the worst of the war. Lewis moved first to New York City, then to Toronto, and finally landed in Windsor, where he remained for several years. In addition to teaching at Assumption College in 1943 and 1944, Lewis was also commissioned by Father Stan Murphy to make these portraits. They are not his finest works—many were painted from yearbook photographs—but they nonetheless are important records of his time here.  

Richard Storms is an American-born Canadian artist whose work examines the legacies of modernism. These portraits of dogs are meant to playfully critique the seriousness of modernist portraiture by capturing the everyday images of dogs that people post on their Facebook accounts and refrigerator doors. By translating these casual photographs into more formal paintings, Storm asks us to see painting itself. In doing so, we can begin to understand how the visual arts can construct our understanding of what we encounter. 

Both Lewis and Storms’ paintings are similar formally, with washes of coloured backgrounds, thinly applied paint, and sourced from photographs. But while Lewis’ work is serious and weighty, Storms’ is playful and subversive. 

Matt Bahen, Paled a Secret Life Holds Sway, 2015, oil on canvas. Anonymous gift, 2025, 2025.03.005

Tom Thomson, Nocturne, 1914, oil on panel. Bequest of E. Margaret Bowlby, 1988, 1988.026

Tom Thomson’s Nocturne (1914) and Matt Bahen’s Paled a Secret Life Holds Sway (2015) showcase how Canadian art tradition in landscape painting has evolved over a century. While both are nocturnes using evocative oil paint brushstrokes to explore the allure of darkness, their intentions and formal qualities diverge, with Bahen’s work offering a critical revision of the tradition Thomson helped establish.  

Thomson’s Nocturne creates an immersive sense of awe; his brushwork captures the forest’s ancient character and presents the northern night almost as a comforting landscape. His technique builds an intense, if controversial, connection to Canada’s natural landscapes–building upon the colonial tradition of depicting the Canadian wilderness as untamed and uninhabited terra nullius.  

Inspired by images of Thomson’s work which he had seen in his youth, Bahen’s imitation of Thomson’s brushwork led him to his signature thick impasto technique. Applying this technique to the twisted, man-made form in Paled a Secret Life Holds Sway, Bahen questions what myths emerge after “our highest symbols have paled.” Centring a hybrid mass of landmines and European war memorials, his landscape is not a pristine Canadian wilderness but a global site of political decay.   

This distinction highlights the core divergence between Thomson and Bahen’s nocturnes; where Thomson’s painting affirms the Romantic soul of the Canadian wilderness, Bahen’s presents a brutalist monument in darkness. Though Bahen has adopted Thomson’s nocturnal genre, material thickness, and the formal language of Canadian landscape tradition, he empties it of nationalistic reverence.