Artist Emily Carr Turns 150
Artist Emily Carr in an undated photo.
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The Victoria-born artist and writer has become an icon of Canadian painting since her death.
December 13 marked artist and writer Emily Carr鈥檚 150th birthday.
The iconic Victoria-born painter was celebrated in local and national media this week, with CBC a new book will be released in late December featuring some of Emily鈥檚 previously unpublished writings.
Largely unrecognized as an artist during her lifetime, she is now viewed as one of Canada鈥檚 great painters. In 2013, her painting Crazy Stair ; earlier this month, her 1931 painting Cordova Drift nearly bested that record, .
But her posthumous eminence has more recently invited a sharper focus
on her impact, noted Pascale Halliday, manager of Emily Carr House in
Victoria, .
鈥淵ou have Indigenous artists like Sonny Assu and Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert who take Emily鈥檚 legacy and look at it in these really interesting ways about how she interacted with the Indigenous community she visited and how she portrayed them in her painting and writing," she said.
鈥淸This was] a woman who was a real person ... with some very complicated views, a very complicated early life, and whose work we can now see neither good or bad exactly, but somewhere in the middle, which is not a very conclusive answer.鈥
Artist Sonny Assu with one of his Interventions On The Imaginary works at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2016.
On his website, artist (BFA 2002) details his Interventions On The Imaginary, a series of works in which he staged 鈥渄igital interventions鈥 on Emily Carr paintings.
鈥淭he title 鈥業nterventions On The Imaginary鈥 is a clear reference to
Marcia Crosby鈥檚 essay, 鈥楾he Construction of the Imaginary Indian,鈥 and
situates itself within the realm of remix culture 鈥 as digital
interventions onto works that contain the colonial gaze,鈥 .
鈥淭hese interventions participate in the growing discourse of
decolonization, acting as 鈥榯ags鈥 to challenging the colonial fantasy of terra nullius
and confronting the dominant colonial culture鈥檚 continued portrayal of
Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race 鈥 I see these bold interruptions
of [Emily Carr鈥檚] landscapes as acts of resistance towards the colonial
subjugation of the First People.鈥
Find out more about Emily Carr . Read an interview with Sonny Assu about his digital interventions .