Unsettling Encounters radically re-examines Emily Carr's achievement in representing Native life on the Northwest Coast in her painting and writing. By reconstructing a neglected body of Carr's work that was central in shaping her vision and career, it makes possible a new assessment of her significance as a leading figure in early-twentieth-century North American modernism.

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 Native 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.

This beautiful volume depicts Emily Carr's fascination with the First Nations peoples of the Northwest Coast.

About the Author
Gerta Moray is a professor of Art History at the University of Guelph. She has previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Edinburgh, Stirling, and Toronto.

Reviews
Unsettling Encounters is the most unified, offering an exhaustive narrative of Carr's engagement with painting village scenes and the arts of the totem poles from the first decade of the 20th century until the mid 1930s. -- Clint Burnham * The Vancouver Sun *
Moray...has written a fascinating and well-researched history on Canadian artist Emily Carr's expeditions to witness and document native art in British Columbia. More than a history, Moray makes a forceful argument for Carr's conscious attempt to represent Native art in a manner consistent with Native life and belief, in part as a critique of non-Native national and religious policies. The text is well illustrated with many period photos, the paintings of other artist, and Carr's own drawings and watercolors...making this a splendid and full resource. * Reference and Research Book News *


Awards
Winner of Clio Award (British Columbia), Canadian Historical Association 2007 (Canada).



Book Information
ISBN 9780774812825
Author Gerta Moray
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint University of British Columbia Press
Publisher University of British Columbia Press
Weight(grams) 1960g