Medium: Milk carton sculpture, cast aluminum, Silk screening, Augmented Reality (AR).

Missing is a response to the prioritization of white bodies over Indigenous ones. When my own mother went missing from Thunder Bay in November of 2018, there were four other (Indigenous) women also missing from the city that week; but when I typed “missing woman Thunder Bay” into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) national website – the country’s largest national news platform – my white mother was the only woman listed.

The violence this country does to Indigenous bodies has become so normalized that when a white woman goes missing it is considered to be newsworthy, but when four Indigenous women do the same, it’s just another Thursday. Missing appears to be a white milk carton on a long, narrow wall-mounted shelf. It is blank save for the black and white image of a white woman printed on one side in the style of a 1980s missing person ad. Here is where AR provides a literal other lens to look through. When viewed through AR on a mobile phone, the screen is filled with milk cartons with the faces of missing Indigenous women pulled with permission from the CBC’s missing and murdered Indigenous women database.

The images continue to change to a new woman, a new face, every few seconds. The intent is to, again, make a comparison via my own self-location. When my mother went missing in Thunder Bay, it was national news. She and I both have the privilege of police concern for the well-being of our bodies because we are white.