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.

Gerta Moray has spent more than two decades tracing Emily Carr's career and her relationship with the First Nations of British Columbia. Her publications include a major award-winning study, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (2006), and Harold Town: Life and Work (Art Canada Institute, 2014), as well as numerous articles in journals, monographs, and exhibition catalogues. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph and holds an MA from Oxford University, a Postgraduate Diploma from the Courtauld Institute, London, and a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Gerta Moray's profile page

• Winner, Clio Award (British Columbia), Canadian Historical Association

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.

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

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

Challenging students to extend their understandings of Emily Carr and her representations of Aboriginal culture, Unsettling Encounters is both a beautiful art book and an extensively researched academic thesis. Combining studies of history, culture, anthropology and politics, Moray outlines the many influences on Carr’s work. Documenting Aboriginal culture through her art pitched her against the racist views prevalent in settler communities as well as Carr’s own limitations as a participant in settler culture. The work includes extensive notes and a bibliographic essay.

Unsettling Encounters was shortlisted for the BC Non-Fiction Award.

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

Challenging students of Canadian art history to extend their understandings of Emily Carr and her representations of First Nations culture, Unsettling Encounters is both a beautiful art book and an extensively researched academic thesis. Moray asserts that Carr’s work is misunderstood and undervalued. Combining studies of history, culture, anthropology and politics, Moray outlines the myriad influences on Carr’s work and how she brought her work into the contemporary art world. Documenting First Nations culture through her art pitched her against the racist and self-serving views prevalent in settler communities as well as Carr’s own limitations as a participant in settler culture.

Includes extensive notes and a bibliographic essay.