The Forgotten

About the Exhibition
Written by Mia Johnson

THE FORGOTTEN is a large-scale, powerful series of portraits of women's faces. Sixty-nine portraits, to be precise - the number of women from Vancouver's downtown eastside who have been missing for more than a decade. The majority of them have now been identified, yet the public's knowledge of them has, for the most part, consisted of small police photos aligned in a grid on a poster, showing most of them as blurred and haggard representations at their worst.

At one time these women had multiple faces and roles in the community. They left thousands of memories and historical details. They were mothers, friends, wives or daughters. They had run from abusive relationships, they were drug addicts, mentally challenged, or had families to support and little means to do it other than prostitution. Many were First Nations people. At this point, 26 of the missing women have been identified as slain by Port Coquitlam farmer Robert Pickton.

The horrific tragedy has affected creative persons - artists, photographers, writers and musicians - in a myriad of ways. Some artists want to create a memorial to the women through their work; some want to advocate for sex-trade workers; some want to personally work through the senseless anguish and pain. Many are drawn to the police photos themselves. Volunteer artists working for the Eden Project are re-drawing the faces, giving each one a warmer presentation so they'll be remembered as victims, not criminals. "Dorette", a Vancouver artist, has drawn and painted small images of the poster pictures repeatedly in an effort to find meaning.

The most intense and commanding project to date about these women, their stories and their plight is a searing initiative by Vancouver artist Pamela Masik. Believing it is our collective responsibility to support and empower individuals of high risk, Masik is painting each woman on a 8 x 10 foot canvas using a style raw with energy and passion. The cinematic scale by itself is scary. She is taking the tiny faces off the poster and forcing us to see the narratives of sadness, anger and fear.

The process is not an easy one. Masik has immersed herself in their stories and the details of the last sightings through their families and social records. She has been deeply challenged by the physical and psychological demands of painting each one on such a large scale. Each enormous portrait is densely layered with powerful brushwork, collaged with personal information and materials, slashed with deep cuts, sewn with stitches, and emblazoned with text written by Masik.

The FORGOTTEN portraits are designed to provoke a personal emotional reaction - something that is becoming harder and harder to accomplish. One hundred years ago, news that a man nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" killed five prostitutes sent shock waves across Western countries that still reverberate. Yet a monstrous anomaly in today's news is like just another body in a television show like CSI.

Are human beings wired to accept only just so much horror? Are we selective about what we respond to? And should we be? These are the kinds of questions that motivate Masik.

Some of the women will fade like ghosts because little, if anything, is known about them. Many, hopefully, will be memorialized and the healing process begun for those who knew them. But Masik's project shouts at us. It speaks of women marginalized in societal structures, made dependent and disillusioned about their own power and self-worth. It points to our own geographic and spiritual distance from them. After all, they are not where we live; they are "downtown"; they are sick, or poor, or "on drugs". We might even think they could help themselves if they really wanted to. We certainly believe other people will help them if we don't. They are invisible both physically and socially in the alleys where we don't go, behind cars where we can't see them, in buildings we will never visit.

This is the moral distance that Masik goes, to make us see their faces and hear their voices, to force us to face the passion, anger and despair in lives and deaths like these. She brings the missing women to us and wraps us in the violence.