The Saints series (2001) takes its cue from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, which notes that the multitudes of Catholic saints are treated by modern scholars with a kind of amused tolerance. Most were inventions: identities assembled to replace pagan gods, feast days mapped onto pre-Christian festivals, miracles borrowed wholesale from older traditions. Sanctity, Walker suggests, was often a practical arrangement. The church needed saints; saints were made.

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MarQuis takes Walker’s provocation and makes it portraiture. If the canonical saints were always pagan archetypes dressed in ecclesiastical robes — a real face placed onto a borrowed idea — then the transaction was never sacred. It was simply casting.

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Saints repeats the casting with Mercury Lounge regulars: staff, patrons, habitués of the long-running Ottawa bar. They stand before flat-faced Ottawa buildings beneath bruised skies, each bearing the one object that binds them to a two-thousand-year tradition — the burnished gold disc, the halo — sitting behind the head of someone who was probably drinking an hour before they posed.

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The joke is gentle. The paintings are not. The con is real, the faces are real, and the architecture of belief the series quietly dismantles is real enough to have outlasted every empire that built it.