SU: The website needed a lot of graphics but this piece was one of my favourites. He took this image of a bone through layer after layer of changes (note the central area of stars in the night sky, for example). And then he would deliberately rough it up – outrageous! For the digirati, graphics that were anti-aliased, with jagged edges and pixels showing was (and is) unheard of. And Ahasiw was a magpie for images. He would blithely take up anything that caught his eye, then work it through his own process to make it very much his own.

AP: n 1993 I was Technical Director of the Pitt Gallery. I was at home one evening when the phone rang around 9pm. It was Ahasiw, who was due to perform at the gallery the next night. “I need a Métis fiddler for tomorrow”. I didn’t know any Métis fiddlers at that time, but I did know Calvin Cairns, who had studied under a master Métis fiddler back in Saskatchewan.

The next day I told Ahasiw I had found a fiddler, but he wasn’t Métis. Ahasiw insisted the fiddler had to be Métis. I told him he was free to locate a genuine Métis fiddler in the seven hours before showtime.

Calvin was great.