| edited by Meg Taylor and Ruth Gaskill with contributions by Erin Silver, Michelle Jacques, Bruce Grenville, Mona Filip, and Heather Anderson

For more than fifteen years, Vancouver-based Sawyer has been creating photographs, texts, video, and music recitals reconstructing the life and work of genre-blurring, fictional artist Natalie Brettschneider. Brettschneider’s story is enhanced with new chapters inspired by real people and events, focusing on a community of women artists working in Vancouver and Victoria in the 1930’s and 40’s. The project is firmly rooted within the legacies of feminist and institutional critique; for Sawyer, the realm of the fictional is a place where the narrative conventions and certainties of the dominant art historical canon can be questioned and challenged.