Canadian Forces Artist Program
In the summer of 2019, I travelled to Latvia as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program (CFAP) to observe Operation REASSURANCE, a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) mission established in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The mission is part of NATO’s broader deterrence and defence strategies in Eastern Europe. The photographs in this series were taken in and around Camp Ādaži, a NATO military base and training ground near Riga, where I was embedded with the enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) Battle Group. At the time, the eFP Battle Group included troops from Canada, Spain, Albania, Montenegro, Poland, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Latvia. Additional images were captured in Estonia during outreach activities. The title of the series responds to a 2023 CAF recruitment campaign.
The photographs explore how violence is framed as heroic and how boys and men are socialized into systems of militarized masculinity. Soldiers are shown in in-between moments outside the spectacle of combat. They are both literal and symbolic targets, shaped by a system that recruits, trains, and disciplines them into rigid roles. In one image, young boys handle real firearms during a CAF outreach event, underscoring how militarized values are introduced through sanctioned forms of play.
Parallel to my time in and after the CFAP residency, I began researching the legacy of Canada’s first official female war artist, Molly Lamb Bobak, focusing in particular on her wartime diary. In response, I developed a contemporary war diary in the form of a sketchbook, combining field observations with reflections on the treatment and representation of women in the Department of National Defence and CAF. The sketchbook merges text and image in a visual narrative. One drawing seen here depicts three Canadian Heroes Force™ action figures released in 2012 to represent real Canadian soldiers and offer a domestic counterpoint to the U.S.-centric GI Joe. Their inclusion highlights how militarized heroism is marketed to children.
Four photographs from the series and selections from the sketchbook were exhibited in the Group 9 CFAP exhibition at the Canadian War Museum (2023 – 2024), alongside reproductions of Bobak’s wartime diary. This project was supported by a grant from Calgary Arts Development.
