FOREVER EMILY

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"A Rushing Sea of Undergrowth"

Emily Carr, "A Rushing Sea of Undergrowth," 1935, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancover Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust.

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"Vanquished"

Emily Carr, "Vanquished," 1930, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust.

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"A Rushing Sea of Undergrowth"

Emily Carr, "A Rushing Sea of Undergrowth," 1935, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancover Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust.

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Trevor Mills

"Above the Gravel Pit"

Emily Carr, "Above the Gravel Pit," 1937, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust.

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Teresa Healy

"Self Portrait with Friends"

Emily Carr, "Self Portrait with Friends," c. 1907, watercolour, graphite and ink on paper. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund.

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"Loggers' Culls"

Emily Carr, "Loggers' Culls," 1935, oil on canvas, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Miss I. Parkyn.

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FOREVER EMILY

The Vancouver Art Gallery examines Emily Carr from all angles.

By Robin Laurence

The subtitle of the latest Emily Carr exhibition, “New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon”, is revealing. It tells us that this ambitious show, which debuted at the National Gallery of Canada in June and lands at the Vancouver Art Gallery in early October, is not so much about Carr’s art as it is about the shifting ground from which it is viewed. One of the show’s leading approaches to its subject is to contrast ways in which Carr was read and publicized in her own day with how she is seen and interpreted, through modern filters, in ours.

An Emily Carr exhibition is always cause for excitement, a chance to view the paintings, drawings and watercolours of the woman who has become one of the most celebrated Canadian artists of the 20th century. Organized jointly by both galleries, the show is the first comprehensive Carr retrospective to tour the country since 1971. 

Visitors will see some of her most famous and iconic canvases, including Indian Church (1929), Big Raven (1931), Totem and Forest (1931), and Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935). Each work is presented in thematic rather than chronological order.

Significantly, a quarter of the 200 objects in the show were not created by Carr. These include archival material (photographs, maps, magazines and other documents relating to Carr’s travels and subjects), as well as historic art by First Nations artists painted during Carr’s era, and paintings of First Nations subjects by a few of Carr’s white contemporaries.

Also on view are some of the artist’s lesser known works, including ceramic pots and hooked rugs, which employ crude reproductions of Northwest Coast motifs as decoration. Carr produced these as a way of supplementing her income during the middle years of her career. At the time she made them (the 1920s), she knew what she was doing was unethical and demeaning to her source material, but she would have been shocked that, a few decades after her death, critics would object to the cultural appropriation evident in her “real” work. Carr sought to honour and preserve rather than commercially exploit indigenous cultures through her paintings and sketches.

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s Ian Thom, who conceived the show as a way of celebrating his institution’s 75th anniversary, determined from the outset that his approach to Emily Carr would not be another march through the linear history of her work. This is the seventh Carr exhibition that Thom has been directly involved in creating, and he wanted to find an alternative way of organizing the work. 

After convening a group of Carr scholars to discuss possible approaches to the subject, he and co-curators Charles Hill (of the National Gallery of Canada) and Johanne Lamoureux (of the Université de Montréal) moved forward with a self-reflective exhibition. It would look at the way Carr’s work had been exhibited in the past — including restaging the National Gallery’s 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern — and would also find new ways to display it in the present.

One section of the show examines Carr’s use of Native imagery within the modernist context of primitivism. Another takes a postmodern approach by implicating Carr’s iconic subject matter in the cultural tourism of the time. Another reading places her reverent depiction of the West Coast landscape against photo-documentation of the large-scale, industrial logging that was taking place around her.

The curators also determined to show not only how Carr constructed herself (through her autobiographical writings and public persona) but also how others have put her story together. The exhibition acknowledges Carr’s popularity, renown, and potential for multiple interpretations by displaying the 90 books and catalogues that have been published about her to date. 

Thom wanted to evoke both the number and the variety of viewpoints on the artist in relation to her own view of herself. The latter includes some of her cartoons and journals, filled with self-mocking caricatures and doggerel. Although little of this material will bolster Carr’s standing as an artist of terrific formal accomplishment (many of her early works show an awkward and inarticulate hand), it does contribute to our understanding of her as a complex and sometimes capricious person.

The image on the cover of the show’s companion book, a 1934 photograph of the artist in her studio, is also germane to the curatorial project. Carr, who would have been 63 at the time, stares at the camera, her left hand on her hip and her right hand resting on the edge of an unframed painting on canvas. Significantly — for the purposes of the show and book — the painting is turned away from the viewer. It’s Carr the person that we see, not her depiction of a swirling West Coast landscape or First Nations totem pole.

Her face, stance and dress express something of her legendary eccentricity: the dark, cursive eyebrows and the taut mouth, the impatient bend of her left arm, the shapeless and unflattering clothing. Still, she is the subject of this photograph, not the object.

“More than most dead artists, Carr has acted as a mirror for the projections of others,” art historian John O’Brian says in the book. Through a number of different means and thematic rearrangements, visitors to the new exhibition will be exposed to some of those projections, and should come to know Carr better. At least, better within the conditions of hindsight and post-colonial values.

Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon runs from October 7, 2006 to January 7, 2007 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from June 2 to September 4, 2006 and will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario from February 24 to May 20, 2007, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts June 21 to September 23,  2007; and Calgary’s Glenbow Museum October 25, 2007 to January 26, 2008.