Quick Pick — Emily Carr Exhibition at VAG

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Emily Carr, “Strangled by Growth,” 1931, oil on canvas (collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust)

With all that’s going on in the world right now, sometimes it feels good to simply look at some beautiful art and breathe for a few minutes.

Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape, at the Vancouver Art Gallery now through Jan. 4, 2026, allows us to do just that — a welcome reprieve from the day's news headlines.

Curated by Richard Hill, the gallery's Smith Jarislowsky senior curator of Canadian Art, the show features more than 20 of Carr’s signature forest paintings. “Emily Carr captured the coastal forest landscape in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art. While others thought of the forests as dense and unappealing, she saw the vitality of the natural world and seized the opportunity to express it,” reads the news release.   

The show “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.” ■

Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery now through Jan. 4, 2026

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