Two more standout portraits are by Gertrude Kearns — one of a soldier suffering PTSD and another of then Major-General Jennie Carignan, the first female Canadian combat soldier to reach that rank (Carignan is now a Lieutenant-General). The portraits of these two women, painted some five decades apart, illustrate just how far the often-troubled relationship between women and the military has evolved.
In curating this exhibition, Barker hopes to shatter notions that war art is simply scenes of soldiers at battle. Thus, visitors will see such contemporary works as Barb Hunt’s installation of pink knitted landmines and Ozell Borden’s quilt, marking the centenary of the all-Black No. 2 Construction Battalion.
The curator sees the evolution of women war artists this way: Women of yesteryear painted what they saw, while contemporary artists “make a statement.”
Take Kearns, for example. She definitely makes statements and is probably the best known living war artist, man or woman, in Canada today. She has three paintings in the exhibition. One is The Dilemma of Kyle Brown: Paradox in the Beyond, 1995, showing a Canadian soldier contemplating the ramifications of his complicity, while on a peacekeeping mission, in the torture death of a Somali civilian. Not in the show is a Kearns painting depicting the actual torture of the Somali man.
Barker says there was no special reason for staging Outside the Lines now (the exhibition was in the planning stages for several years, long before the current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East began, so the exhibition does not feature any works related to those two conflicts). But the show is timely in that it comes at a juncture when various institutions are re-examining the contributions of women artists of yesteryear. Among them was the recent crowd-pleasing nationally touring exhibition Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Movement organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto.
