Painting
(Oil on Birch Wood Panel) 2026.
Knowing Jane Doe operates as an extended meditation on memory, projected grief, and the ethics of representational portraiture.
The artwork is an extension of Dorothy, an earlier performance and installation that emerged from a singular, unconventional encounter: the wake of ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Margaret Allard, held on February 3, 2015, at Hulse, Playfair & McGarry Funeral Home in Ottawa. In this instance, the encounter between artist and subject occurred through the intimate and paradoxical circumstances of collective mourning.
A translucent veil separates Dorothy, as subject, from the viewer, evoking the fragile threshold between knowing and not knowing. The portrait centres on a woman known only through an obituary and a funeral visitation, an individual briefly encountered, subsequently reconstructed, and ultimately remembered through fragments, emotional projection, and invention.
Knowing Jane Doe reflects on the human tendency to fill existential gaps, to manufacture intimacy with strangers as a means of negotiating personal grief and trauma, and to transform absence and anonymity into sites of personal significance. It considers how, in the face of absence, memory begins to invent.
The portrait becomes an attempted resurrection shaped by mourning, fixated longing, and an almost instinctive refusal to allow a stranger’s identity—or, more precisely, the interpretation and invention of one—to disappear entirely unnoticed, even decades after death.