Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr

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.

Gerta Moray is professor of art history at the University of Guelph.