At the age of two, R. Gary Miller was forcibly removed from his home on the Six Nations Mohawk Reservation in Brantford, Ontario, and placed in the notoriously brutal Mohawk Institute, one of Canada’s oldest and longest running Anglican residential schools. His experience of abuse and neglect has subsequently informed his artistic practice, which often vacillates between images of abuse and horror and those which depict a fragile hope.

Miller’s mature work is dominated by large, heavily built-up oil canvases. By contrast, these two works are from an earlier period when the artist was exploring and experimenting with style and medium. In Cayuga a ghostly face fills the picture plane and is seemingly sliced in half, one side in darkness, the other bathed in red. The title refers to his own identity as a Six Nations Haudenosaunee of Cayuga lineage. By contrast, Things Within Things- Winter is heavily influenced by the Woodland school and its abstracted subjects, heavy black curving outlines or ‘spirit lines’, x-ray view of the subject, and strong use of blocked colour. In this case, the x-ray view is further emphasized by the artist’s incorporation of forms within forms; here smaller animals appear inside a stylized caribou possibly representing the caribou’s inner spirit.