In his paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works on paper, Simon Hughes embraces and sends up his native Canada and explores his position as a Canadian contemporary artist. Though he has worked in other mediums, Hughes has been focused almost exclusively on works on paper since 2000. With watercolor, acrylic, transferred images, stickers, and the scribbles of his own daughter, he composes cartoonish Canadian urban and rural scenes, as well as abstract, Modernist compositions inspired by wintry landscapes. With subtlety and wit, he reveals the tensions between the native and settler populations and explores the unique, hybrid culture that developed out of the mixing of these two groups. This is most poignantly expressed in the edifices recurring throughout his works, composed of an outlandish mixture of rustic and modern materials—wooden beams, glass, steel—and populated by stereotyped figures of Canadian Indians.