Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape invites viewers into Emily Carr’s haunting interplay between enclosure and horizon. More than 20 of her signature forest paintings dominate one wall in dense succession, creating an almost tactile mist of foliage and trunks that deliberately resists entry. Opposite, a single work depicting a clear‑cut landscape stretches toward an open horizon, offering contrast—a moment of visual space that recalls Carr’s own spiritual longings. The curatorial design accentuates the tension in Carr’s handling of space: at once promising a communion with nature, and yet withholding it.

Carr’s art emerges here at the intersection of Romantic spiritual impulse and modernist form. Influenced by her study of European avant‑gardes and deeply rooted in the rainforests of BC’s coast, she stylizes massed volumes, plays with density and light, alternately closing off vistas and offering glimpses of sky. With Indigenous villages and totem poles appearing in her forest scenes, the show also invites reflection on how Carr positioned these elements—deploying them in relation to the natural environment, and in relation to colonial ideas that conflated Indigenous identity with nature.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Richard Hill, this exhibition is open from January 25, 2025 until January 4, 2026.

Critical response:

• Robin Laurence, writing in Border Crossings, describes the exhibition as “visually engaging and thoughtfully executed,” particularly moved by the “wow!” effect generated by the dense cluster of forest interiors. She praises how Carr’s works here “bring us smack up against a wall of dense foliage rather than being transported” into deep illusionistic space—an effect that subverts expectation. Border Crossings
• In Galleries West, a reviewer notes that the exhibition provides “a welcome reprieve” from the everyday, allowing visitors to simply breathe and reconnect through Carr’s vibrant portrayal of BC’s coastal forests. Galleries West
• From Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, Vicki Duong emphasizes how the show captures the “spiritual and physical interplay within BC’s rainforests,” presenting Carr’s forests not just as landscapes, but as places charged with mystery, vitality, and tension between enclosure and openness. The Georgia Straight