Vancouver Art Gallery Research Articles

Reconsidering Emily Carr

Gerta Moray. Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Cart. Vancouver: UBC Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 386 pp. Illustrations. Bibliographic essay. Index. $75.00 hc. Donald Ellis, ed. Tsimshian Treasures: The Remarkable Journey of the Dundas Collection. Dundas, ON: Donald Ellis Gallery; Vancouver: Douglas and McIntryre; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 144 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. $55.00 hc. Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux, Ian M. Thom, curators. Essays by Jay Steward and Peter Macnair et al. Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006. 336 pp. Illustrations. Works in the Exhibition. Bibliography. $75.00 hc. Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr evolves out of Gerta Moray's doctoral dissertation, Northwest Coast Native Culture and the Early Indian Paintings of Emily Carr, 1899-1913 (University of Toronto, 1993). Marcia Crosby, a writer and historian of Tsimshian and Haida ancestry--as well as the grand-daughter of Clara and William Russ, whose portraits Carr painted in 1928--wrote the foreword. The Russes were, as Crosby notes, Cart's guides in 1912 to some of the Haida villages, the people she fictively named 'Jimmie and Louise,' each story titled by the names of places where they'd taken her to paint: 'Tampp,' 'Skedans,' and 'Cumshewa' (vi). They were also her hosts sixteen years later when she returned on a second northern expedition to paint in Haida Gwaii (vi). Carr wrote to Marius Barbeau in 1928 about her intended trip, want to get back, even if the poles are all gone I want to get the feel of the places again (291). The choice of Crosby to write a foreword for Moray's book is symptomatic of our times. It is a respectful response to sentiments, which Crosby voices, that aboriginal memories and perspectives are not foregrounded sufficiently in the telling of Canadian history/art history: Whether the questions Moray raises in her book will bring its readers closer to listening to First Nations' viewpoints about colonial history or Carr remains to be seen. But through Moray's text, I recognize Cart more clearly in a context I know and understand: race relations and the colonial and patriarchal history of British Columbia and Canada (vi). Moray herself pays tribute to E.S. Said when she observes that he has opened up a rich vein of exploration, showing how literary, scholarly, and political discourse on non-western cultures obeyed the thought structures, wishes and fantasies of the dominant West (3, 5). Moray divides her book into three parts. In part 1 she traces the course of white settlement along the British Columbia coast and its consequences for aboriginal peoples. She also explains the Victoria and Vancouver context in which Carr's life was lived, as well as Carr's own family history. Repeatedly Moray feels obliged to forgive Carr for what today must be seen as patronizing attitudes--among them, her belief that by recording the Indian totems she was somehow rescuing a dying culture. Nevertheless, Moray maintains repeatedly that Carr was more sensitive than her contemporaries to the plight of Aboriginal peoples and decidedly more appreciative of their artistic production. Such claims are made on the basis of limited and even questionable evidence. For example, Moray tells us that Carr went on her painting and sketching adventures without benefit of a camera. One really must question Carr's wisdom here, and ask Moray if this is truly evidence of cultural sensitivity, as she implies, or a bad idea on the part of someone who conscientiously wants to record Indian totems? In fact, as Moray subsequently tells us, Carr relied on others' photographs from time to time as visual guidelines for some of her paintings. Cart also appropriated Indian designs for her own pottery which she sold as tourist trinkets. …

Grace Pailthorpe et Reuben Mednikoff à Vancouver. La transmission du surréalisme au Canada anglais, 1942–1946

In July 1940, the British Surrealist artists Dr Grace W. Pailthorpe (also a prominent psychiatrist) and Reuben Mednikoff set sail for the United States. After a two-year stay in New York City and Berkeley in California, they moved in July 1942 to British Colombia, Canada, where Dr Pailthorpe accepted a position at the Provincial Mental Institute of Essondale. Later in Vancouver, she founded the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency and was invited with her husband by the Vancouver Art Gallery to exhibit their paintings and give a conference on Surrealism. This series of events made British Colombia the launching pad for Surrealism in Western Canada with one Surrealist exhibition and three conferences on Surrealism. One of these talks was even broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the radio show Mirror for Women. Vancouver warmly welcomed Breton's movement in contrast to Toronto, which held a Surrealist exhibition at the 1938 Central National Exhibition. The reasons for Vancouver’s openness are twofold: most importantly, Pailthorpe’s association with science lent credibility; and Vancouver at the time was open to new ideas. This article focuses on the Canadian sojourn of these two important artists in the context of Canada’s adoption of Surrealist ideas (Automatism being the most important) and the publication of the CBC transcripts of Dr Pailthorpe’s seminar.

Rodney Graham's Multiple Identities

Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, curated by Grand Arnold, Jessica Bradley, and Cornelia Butler; presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Spring, 2004; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, July 25–November 29, 2004; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, February 5–May 1, 2005; and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, from September 10–December 23, 2005. An accompanying illustrated catalogue contains essays by the show’s curators and critics Sara Krajewski, Lynne Cooke, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Shepherd Steiner.

Of Writing Machines and Scholar-Gipsies

THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY recently mounted an exhibition entitled the Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Proceeding in a roughly chronological manner, the exhibition provided an overview of some of the many ways which the melding of human and machine has been imagined in both the fine arts and popular culture, from the nineteenth century to the present. The visitor to the Gallery was greeted at the outset by a cherubic mechanical boy, dressed in a red satin waistcoat and matching hat that one imagines would have looked very fashionable in 1810, when it was made. The automaton stood at a small writing desk, a stylus poised over a blank sheet of paper. The story goes that when it was donated to the Franklin Institute in 1928, the machine was little more than a box of loose parts, having been recently destroyed in a fire. Automatons from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century were designed to reproduce some distinctly human action, such as playing chess, or dancing a jig, but in its present condition there was no way to predict what this one was meant to do. Over the next months, the complex arrangement of wheels and gears was painstakingly reassembled. Finally, it was wound up and let go. To the amazement of those present, the machine bent over its piece of paper and composed a poem in French, before concluding with the phrase, Ecrit par Maillardet (Grenville 14). Visitors today seemed no less surprised by Maillardet's automaton, the exhibit drawing, at least on the day I was in attendance, a great deal more attention than the cubist paintings of Leger and Picasso, or the video installations showing sequences from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. We expect a computer to play chess, or a metallic policeman to wield a rapid-fire rifle, but writing is somehow different. It suggests the presence not of a program but of a person, one whose actions are the free and spontaneous expressions of some deep reserve of selfhood, an inwardness or depth of being which is capable of reflecting on itself as a self. The very appearance of writing, as Plato suggests in the Phaedrus, is always marked by the trace or outline of a living presence, the unique individual who is both the source and origin of the enunciative act. No wonder, then, the interest of the crowds in Maillardet's automaton, and its precocious claim to authorship. There is a certain audacity to the act of signing its poem, and not only because L'Automaton Maillardet is less a proper name than it is a kind of brand or corporate logo. What we recognize in this performance is not so much the machine's failure to be human, as something of our own, the automaton's efforts to establish itself as the origin of expression mirroring our own need to assure ourselves that it is we that write words and not words that write us. The small flourish of the pen as the automaton signs its name seems strangely familiar. To someone who is interested in the relationship of technology to the study of literature, what was most surprising about this representation of the writing machine was its evident delight in its subject matter. Evoking little of the fear or dread that one typically associates with the uncanny, Maillardet's automaton stands in marked contrast to the dominant tone of much of the contemporary debate concerning the effects of technology on the practices of reading and writing. In his study of the decline of book culture, The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts places the blame for the current state of literacy on the computer, and the highly mediated forms of social interaction that result from networked communications. Following a line of argumentation first developed by Marshall McLuhan, Birkerts claims that the sequential nature of print, in which the reader must gather meaning in a cumulative manner as she proceeds from the left to the right margin and from the top to the bottom of the page, has given way to the instantaneity of the electric circuit. …

Mise En Abyme

Book Review| August 01 2000 Mise En Abyme Mirror’s Edge, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada March 18-August 13, 2000 organized by the BildMuseet, Umei, Sweden Karen Henry Karen Henry Karen Henry is a curator and writer based in Vancouver. She is currently adjunct curator at Presentation House Gallery. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2000) 28 (1): 13. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2000.28.1.13 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karen Henry; Mise En Abyme. Afterimage 1 August 2000; 28 (1): 13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2000.28.1.13 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2000 by The Regents of the University of California2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Fine arts libraries in British Columbia: culture on the West Coast of Canada

Fine arts and culture have existed in British Columbia from the time that the First Peoples came to the North Pacific coast of Canada. Vancouver’s first fine arts library was established in 1930 at the Vancouver Public Library; significant collections have subsequently been developed at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and the University of British Columbia. They serve a diverse clientele: students, artists and researchers. Outlook, a province-wide network, provides access via the Internet to library catalogues of public, college and institution libraries throughout the Province.

Reticence and Reverence

Review| February 01 1997 Reticence and Reverence Photography and Beyond In Japan Hara Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan November 19-February 19, 1995 Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional, Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, June 7-September 3, 1995 Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada, October 18-December 10, 1995 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, February 22-May 5, 1996 Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D .C., June 8-August 25, 1996 Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, October 12-January 5, 1997 The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 30-April 5, 1997 Ann Lee Morgan Ann Lee Morgan Ann Lee Morgan writes on modern and contemporary art from Princeton, NJ Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1997) 24 (4): 18–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1997.24.4.18 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ann Lee Morgan; Reticence and Reverence. Afterimage 1 February 1997; 24 (4): 18–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1997.24.4.18 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1997 by The Regents of the University of California1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Vancouver The Expo Legacy

For the duration of Expo 86 most Vancouver theatres looked as if they had been hit by a neutron bomb: the buildings were standing, but the audience had disintegrated. In mid-August, with almost two months remaining in the World’s Fair, the Vancouver Social Planning department began surveying the damage in order to make a report to city council. Some cultural institutions – notably the Vancouver Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology – were having a banner year as tourists flocked to their special exhibits. But performing arts companies, which were suddenly competing with “the world’s best” as well as with the glitz of the fair itself, were bruised and battered. In their responses to the survey, theatre companies and rental halls related a litany of financial woes. The Vancouver Playhouse, bolstered by Expo optimism, offered a summer season featuring remounts of their big hits of 1985-86, A Chorus Line and Noises Off. According to the survey, the Playhouse lost $175,000. Arts Club managing director Bill Millerd reported that his three theatres were “down approximately $250,000 in revenue compared to 1985” for May, June, and July.

Morrice at Montreal. James Wilson Morrice 1865-1924. An exhibition held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 December 1985 — 2 February 1986; circulating to the Musée du Québec, 27 February — 20 April 1986, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 15 May — 29 June 1986, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 25 July — 14 September 1986, and

Morrice at Montreal. James Wilson Morrice 1865-1924. An exhibition held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 December 1985 — 2 February 1986; circulating to the Musée du Québec, 27 February — 20 April 1986, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 15 May — 29 June 1986, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 25 July — 14 September 1986, and