By Audrey Wang, AGGV Volunteer
December 13th, 2021, marks the 150th anniversary of Emily Carr’s birth. Beyond this commemoration, the AGGV’s exhibition Emily Carr: Seeing + Being Seen features artworks that carry significance that is as relevant today as they were nearly a century ago when they were first made.
By Mel Granley, Guest Curator
Emily Carr has become almost synonymous with the Pacific Northwest; her work being displayed year-round in different exhibition contexts to ensure the satisfaction of visitors to the AGGV. This drive to see her work is directed by the idea of checking off a list of great and thoroughly known artists within the artistic canon. The issue? The “art canon” is heavily Euro-Western centered and very keenly demonstrates a bias for settler-European art, while largely failing to acknowledge the artistic merits of historic and contemporary BIPOC artists.
Nicole Stanbridge, Curator of Engagement, AGGV, interviews India Rael Young, Curator of Art and Images at the Royal BC Museum about the exhibition Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing – French Modernism and the West Coast.
By Audrey Wang, AGGV Volunteer
In the exhibition Celebrating the AGGV Collection, three contemporary artworks stand out for their interconnectedness with other parts of the AGGV’s collection.
By Audrey Wang, AGGV Volunteer
Celebrating the AGGV Collection brings together the highlights in the AGGV’s permanent collection of artworks, bringing into perspective the breadth and depth of the Gallery’s holdings.
Abstraction in art is a visual language that uses line, colour, form and composition that are non-representational or independent to a certain degree of any reference to the world.
Emily Carr’s works compare and contrast with the works of David Milne, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Vera Weatherbie and many others, giving the viewer a chance to come to terms with the meanings behind the paintings and the artists’ take on exploring the varied landscapes of Canada.
This is the imagined Emily Carr as a child, dreamed up by the award-winning Victoria-based children’s author, Kit Pearson, in her book A Day of Signs and Wonders (Harper Collins, 2016). We visited Pearson at her Oak Bay home which she shares with artist Katherine Farris and their two dogs, Piper and Brio, for a discussion on her book, and the two protagonists who lived in Victoria in 1881 – 9-year-old Emily and 13-year-old Kathleen O’Reilly.
At December’s Family Sunday, we were happy to welcome our guests, artist Farheen Haq and her son Cairo, as well as the CBC’s Khalil Akhtar. Through art exploration, performance and food, our guests explored ideas about what it means to come “home”.
Activating Emily is a fun and dynamic educational resource targetted at viewers of all ages. Utilizing both a conventional activity-book format and an interactive mobile app with image recognition technology, the experience of enjoying Carr’s paintings is enhanced through the “activation” of the gallery spaces.
