2SLGBTQ+ portraits challenge power systems

A table can look neutral. It can look ordinary. But in At the Table: The Architecture of Control, Jeannette Sirois asks us to consider what happens around tables where decisions are made, records are kept, identities are classified, and lives are governed without the presence of the people most affected.

Presented on the Mahon Hall stage from July 3 to 27 as part of the Artcraft Showcase series, At the Table is a powerful large-scale portrait installation examining the systems through which queer and trans lives have been classified, regulated and administered by legal, medical, bureaucratic and religious institutions. At the centre of the work are 12 portrait drawings, each 40 by 60 inches, rendered in layered coloured pencil on paper mounted to aluminum panels.

Positioned almost like a group of jurors, the portraits sit in judgement of those systems, represented by an empty table and chair set in front of the artworks. The figures are drawn at approximately twice life size, occupying the scale historically reserved for heads of state, judges and institutional leaders.

“Here, that scale is redirected,” Sirois explains in her artist’s statement. “The sitters are queer and trans witnesses, positioned at a white administrative table under flat, shadowless lighting that flattens form and refuses the warmth of conventional portraiture.”

Across each white ground, text authored by the sitter presses forward in dense, all-caps blocks that echo the visual language of institutional documents: codes, forms and legislation.

Sirois is a Salt Spring-based artist working in large-scale portrait drawing and research creation, has exhibited widely and is a two-time Kingston Prize finalist. Selected by the Artcraft Committee in 2025 for the 2026 season, At the Table has gone on to secure exhibitions at public galleries across British Columbia and will potentially add a national tour. A print version will additionally show at the West Vancouver Memorial Library in conjunction with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights travelling exhibition Love in a Dangerous Time.

Sirois is thrilled by the widespread recognition, but equally grateful for the local support, which included two Catalyst Grants from the Wilding Foundation. She also credits the island residents who chose to share their stories and their likenesses for the project without knowing if the show would achieve the reach that it has.

“I'm really grateful that the work is being shown on the island, where it was created with all of the people who are from Salt Spring,” Sirois said. “It was the springboard, and that's amazing. That shows what kind of a community that Salt Spring is. The community that is really open to all sorts of possibilities.” 

Working over the course of two years to produce the 12 portraits, Sirois videotaped her sitters so she could re-enter their stories over approximately two months of drawing per piece. Her chosen medium of coloured pencil and rendering of realistic representation meanwhile combined for painstaking labour.

“But it's this slow process of the drawing that actually is a counter to the quickness of institutional standing,” Sirois noted. ”When a law is written, it is stamped really quick, and is archived, and then we follow that law, but the process that I went through with these drawings is a slow learning process. It's understanding and looking at who the subject is, and really kind of striving to get the essence of who they are within that drawing process of what I was doing.”

Lettering the words that appear behind each sitter was another timely exercise, and since these carry personal testimony they are deliberately difficult to read. “Their difficulty asks something of the viewer. To read them fully, one must slow down, lean in, and remain with the person before them.”

Visitor responses collected at the various venues will appear printed on banners as accumulated testimony, carrying the work forward as it tours British Columbia as part of a living archive.

At the Table: The Architecture of Control opens Friday, July 3 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. An artist talk follows on July 5 from 2 to 3 p.m. The exhibition is open through July 27 during Artcraft hours, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.