O'er the Western Hills
September 16 – December 8, 2021
University of Waterloo Art Gallery

Thank you to the Waterloo Region Arts Fund for their support of this project.

Borrowing its title from a Homer Watson drawing (c. 1875), the series O’er the Western Hills was inspired by early Canadian ad campaigns that depicted idealized, anonymous women and a romanticized life “on the frontier”. Each of these paintings were conceived of in collaboration with the subjects, who ranged from students and temp workers, to teachers and retirees, from a range of specialized STEM fields, including: fire safety, water quality, wetland conservation, contaminated site remediation, regenerative permaculture, as well as ethics and justice, accessibility and outreach, and astrophysics.

Despite their many professional accomplishments, the day-to-day reality of these women and gender-oppressed science workers remains largely dominated by masculinity, whiteness, hetero-cis-normativity, and other privilege.