Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape

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Emily Carr, “Strangled by Growth,” 1931

oil on canvas (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.42) (courtesy of the Gallery)

When Emily Carr (1871–1945) wrote about landscape paintings—her own and those of others—she would sometimes describe how an eye might move through the imagined space in the work. It is striking, then, that so many of her own paintings create an experience of dense, impenetrable forest that confounds such forward movement. In many cases, the viewer is tantalized with the opportunity of communion with a carefully observed natural environment, while simultaneously foiled in the prospect of imaginatively entering its depths.

In its exhibition design, Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape draws out the question of the opening and closing-off of space in Carr’s landscapes by contrasting a densely hung group of paintings with sparsely hung later works that depict an open horizon. Ironically, many of the spatially open works are open precisely because they depict landscapes that had been recently subject to clear-cut logging.

This exhibition uses the spatial metaphor of closeness to and distance from nature to probe Carr’s thinking about the forests she painted. It will also examine how Carr’s representation of some Indigenous subjects—particularly villages and totem poles set within landscapes—sit in relation to the dense forest and what this might suggest, given the late 19th- and early 20th-century tendency to conflate Indigenous cultures with nature.