Unsettling Encounters: First Nations imagery in the art of Emily Carr
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Unsettling Encounters radically re-examines Emily Carr's achievement in representing Native life on the Northwest Coast, and her goals and achievements in representing Native villages and totem poles in her paintings and writings. Reconstructing a neglected body of Carr's works that was central in shaping her vision and career makes possible a new assessment of her significance as a leading figure in the history of early twentieth-century Modernism. Unsettling Encounters includes a vivid recreation of the rapidly changing historical and social circumstances in which Carr painted and wrote. She lived and worked in British Columbia at a time when the growing settler population was rapidly taking over and developing the land and its resources. Gerta Moray argues that Carr's work takes on its full significance only when it is seen as a conscious intervention in settler-Native relations. She examines the work in relation to the images of Native peoples that were then being constructed by missionaries and anthropologists and exploited by the promoters of world's fairs and museums. Carr's famous, highly expressive later paintings were based to a great extent on the results of her early experience. At the same time they were a response to new currents in North American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Moray explores Carr's participation in the Group of Seven's agenda to build a national culture and her sense of her own position as a woman artist in this masculine arena. Unsettling Encounters is the definitive study of Carr's "Indian" images, locating them both within the local context of Canadian history and the wider international currents of visual culture.
Beyond Wilderness : the Group of Seven, Canadian identity and contemporary art
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The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven's artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked beyond wilderness to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors. Beyond Wilderness expands the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century to the present. curators, historians, feminists, media theorists, and cultural critics and exactingly reproduced artworks by contemporary and historical artists are brought together in productive dialogue. Beyond Wilderness explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took.
The Group of Seven
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Marking the 75th anniversary of their formation, this book describes the background from which the Group of Seven emerged, and argues that the groups's struggle for recognition reflected a greater struggle for Canadian national identity.
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson
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"Silcox [is] a wonderfully lucid stylist . . . this definitive volume presents 400 supreme color reproductions . . . covering the entire spectrum of the proficient and prolific group's magnificent output . . . every painting is vibrantly, radiantly, and gloriously alive: a veritable hymn to life." -- Booklist At a critical time in Canada's history, the Group of Seven revolutionized the country's appreciation of itself by celebrating Canada as a wild and beautiful land. These paintings of the wilderness evoke the same response in viewers today as they did when first exhibited. Now in paperback, The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson is even more affordable than the celebrated original hardcover edition. This award-winning bestseller includes many never-before reproduced paintings and presents the most complete and extensive collection of these artists' works ever published. The 400 paintings and drawings reveal the remarkable genius of all 10 painters who, at some point, were part of the movement. Tom Thomson, who died before the Group was established, was always present in the public mind. Included are works by: Frank Carmichael Frank Johnston A.J. Casson Arthur Lismer Le Moine FitzGerald J.E.H. MacDonald Lawren Harris Tom Thomson Edwin Holgate F.H. Varley A.Y. Jackson. The artwork is organized by the various regions of Canada, with additional sections on the war years and still-life paintings. Introductory essays provide a context for a greater understanding and appreciation of Canada's most celebrated artists.
