Description
Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr by Gerta Moray, Professor of Art History at the University of Guelph, provides in-depth assessment of Emily Carr and her legacy of art in the Canadian context. The coffee-table art book contains 283 illustrations and 91 colour plates of Carr's work. Marcia Crosby, writer and instructor in English and Native Studies, Malaspina University, provides a personal foreword about Emily Carr and her art that focused so much on First Nations in British Columbia. The book includes an extensive bibliographic essay, detailed index, and maps showing the First Nations located in British Columbia. Gerta Moray vividly recreates the rapidly changing historical and social circumstances in which the artist painted and wrote. Carr 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. Moray argues that Carr’s work takes on its full significance only when it is seen as a conscious intervention in Native-settler relations. She examines the work in the context of images of First Nations peoples then being constructed by missionaries and anthropologists and exploited by promoters of world’s fairs and museums. Carr’s famous, highly expressive later paintings were based to a great extent on her early experiences of travel to First Nations communities. At the same time they were a response to the hopes and anxieties that attended the rapid modernization of North American culture in the 1920s and ’30s. Moray explores Carr’s participation, with the Group of Seven, in an agenda of building 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 within both the local context of Canadian history and the wider international currents of visual culture.