Pamela Masik and The Forgotten: Vancouver’s Missing Women

Pamela Masik

Cross-posted from The Shebeen Club, because it’s such a terrific event. If I knew how to get out there, I’d go. Anybody wanna give me a ride?

(from Twitter, obviously, via the very handy Tweetshots utility)

NOV27, 7-10pm LANGLEY ARTS TALKS: Pamela Masik, artist of the painting series The Forgotten: Vancouver’s missing women. Talks beside Fort Pub, Glover Rd $7 OR$5/members

From her website, more information on the project:

THE FORGOTTEN is a large-scale, powerful series of portraits of women’s faces. Sixty-nine portraits, to be precise – the number of women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside who have been missing for more than a decade. The majority of them have now been identified, yet the public’s knowledge of them has, for the most part, consisted of small police photos aligned in a grid on a poster, showing most of them as blurred and haggard representations at their worst.

At one time these women had multiple faces and roles in the community. They left thousands of memories and historical details. They were mothers, friends, wives or daughters. They had run from abusive relationships, they were drug addicts, mentally challenged, or had families to support and little means to do it other than prostitution. Many were First Nations people. At this point, 26 of the missing women have been identified as slain by Port Coquitlam farmer Robert Pickton.

And here is my own post about my run-in with Pickton. My book, by the way, is called Terminal City: Vancouver’s Missing Women, so I already feel we’re on the same page. I highly recommend checking out the video on her website.