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She Wished She Had Been Named Hope As A Reminder is part of Laurie Papou’s Vanity Suite, a series of four portraits that recasts the Three Graces (Faith, Hope and Charity) as modern women engaged in a suggestive striptease for a clothed male figure. Surrounded by a ravaged west coast forest that has been clear-cut, Papou’s subject stands in a powerful posture, scantily clad in a black bra. Her sexualized position amid the destroyed landscape is a probing commentary on the vulnerability and destructive patterns of human behaviour. Taken together, this body of work becomes a performative staging of the male gaze, through which the viewer becomes caught in the act of voyeurism.