Missing women featured in oil paintings

A missing northern Ontario teenager will be among the subjects including in an art project coming to Sudbury as part of this months Mayworks Festival.

"The Missing Women Project" is a series of 18 painted portraits of Ontario women who have disappeared between 1970 and 2000.

Among them is Melanie Ethier, a 15-year-old girl from New Liskeard who vanished after a party in 1996.

"My idea behind making oil paintings of these women was to monumentalize these women and show that they're important," said Ilene Sova, the Toronto artist behind the project.

"They're quite large and to make them big and kind of confront the viewer with this massive face is part of that monumentalizing that I'm trying to do."

Sova said she wants to get people talking about these cold cases again, and to show that violence against women does not discriminate against age or social status.

"One of the most shocking statistics I found in my research was... that the number one cases of injury to women in Ontario is domestic violence," she added.