Mary Caesar, Hair Being Cut by Nuns, 2017

Another of Caesar’s works from the same year, Flashbacks and Memories, 2017, depicts a school and the abuse inflicted by a nun. This painting shifts the focus from a symbolic ritual to the lived environment and the experience of structural violence. Here, Caesar gives us an institutional panorama—buildings, dormitories, corridors—infused with emotional tension. The nun looms large and gestures menacingly, administering punishment. Caesar represents herself in a submissive posture, isolated and stooped, underscoring her vulnerability within the vast, impersonal architecture.

The two paintings operate as companion pieces: one capturing the performative, symbolic rupture of the haircut, and the other laying bare the underlying system of control that made such ruptures possible—the school, the nuns, and the structures of discipline. Caesar’s expressive vivid palette, at times flat, at times harsh, works against sentimentality. It demands, rather than invites, the viewer’s attention.

These works also speak to memory and the often painful need to remember. They function as archive, testimony, and moral provocation. They disrupt the silence that colonial institutions enforced. By centring Indigenous experience in her aesthetic logic, Caesar resists the erasure that the residential school system sought to impose. The paintings invite a related engagement: we are asked not merely to look but to reckon, to feel, to consider complicity and the possibilities of repair.

The emotional force of these works lies in their balance of personal vulnerability and collective witness. Caesar does not reduce her subject to victimhood, nor does she offer facile uplift. Rather, she holds tension between pain and resilience, memory and loss, silence and testimony. In doing so, her paintings contribute to a visual archive of trauma, survival, and ongoing responsibility. They demand that Canada, and the viewers, remember and engage as implicated witnesses, not passive sympathizers.