heroes/ghosts reflects upon urban and state-sponsored violence, human-made climate disruption, and how aboriginal logic works and prevails in its midst. the aboriginal spirit, relationship to Mother Earth and her Beings, are honored here. internal strength despite all horrors and threats, is honored through images of saints for our time: the little girl who wears her traditional First Nations clothes, knowing it targets her to the death squads (2012; prophecy); the man who risks his life at Gustafsen Lake (jj Weather Changer); surviving thoughts and acts of suicide (high flier) are examples.

this series thinks about the every day heroic acts of surviving modernity and its colonial impositions; the waves of colonizers, land dispossession, Indian Residential Schools.  Heroic acts are raising children and the power of the ancestors (Here, again); and animal helpers (ask me, i know).

the paintings are here translated into icons, a sort of holy cards; the resultant painting a witness to horrors, injustice, the chaos of our times, a descriptor of the saint's work in modern life (our sometimes collective internal struggle to survive modern life and the many waves of colonial impositions).

i hope these painting prove holy people walk among us in the street and in the village, they are inside us and outside us, and that these paintings may be a testament to we, Survivors.