The Martyrs Series (1997) is a body of eight paintings exhibited at the Mercury Lounge in Ottawa — two large canvases at 60×40 inches and six at 40×30 — built around a recurring scenario: a figure aiming a gun at their own reflection.

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Two models, male and female. The same mirror, the same dresser, the same confrontation — painted repeatedly in radically different palettes. Red. Blue. Blazing orange. Cool grey-green. Each colour shift changes the psychological temperature of the scene entirely, turning one image into many different emotional states.

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The titles were drawn from Suicide is Painless — the Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman song made famous as the theme to Robert Altman's M*A*S*H — a song about the quiet logic of self-destruction. But the series is not about suicide. It is about something more universal and more daily: the way we stand in front of our own reflection and take aim. The figure is their own worst enemy. The gun points nowhere else.

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The woman in the wingback chair — gun held loosely at her side, gaze averted — is the series' stillest and most unsettling image. No mirror. Just her, the weapon, and whatever she is deciding.