JUG320S: The Canadian Wilderness

JUG320S: The Canadian Wilderness Week 4: Painting the Wilderness Professor Emily Gilbert http://individual.utoronto.ca/emilygilbert/

Today’s Themes I: Tom Thomson II: Group of Seven III: Emily Carr IV: Norval Morrisseau V: Contemporary Artists

I: Tom Thomson (1877-1917) • 1903: gets first commercial art job in Seattle • 1907: working at Grip Limited • 1911: goes camping in Mississagi Forest Reserve • 1912: working with Rous and Mann Ltd • 1913: first major painting: A Northern Lake • 1914: takes friends AY Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley camping in Algonquin Park

1915: living in Algonquin Park part of the year; shares a studio in Toronto with Jackson and Franklin Carmichael 1917: dies mysteriously on Canoe Lake Fishing at Tea Lake Dam c. 1915; Photograph by Lawren Harris

II: The Group of Seven FH Varley, Franklin Carmichael, AY Jackson, Lawren Harris, Barker Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and JEH MacDonald Group of Seven formed March 1920 • Emotive, expressionist art: theosophy • Reception mixed: “hot mush school” • "Get in the habit of looking at the sky. It is the source of light and art.” • “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our great country” • “art must grow and flower in the land before the country [would] be a real home for its people”

Group of Seven formed March 1920 • Emotive, expressionist art: theosophy • Reception mixed: “hot mush school” • "Get in the habit of looking at the sky. It is the source of light and art.” • “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our great country” • “art must grow and flower in the land before the country [would] be a real home for its people”

“It is only through the deep and vital experience of its total environment that a people identifies itself with its land and gradually a deep and satisfying awareness develops. We were aware that no virile people could remain subservient to, and dependent upon the creations in art of other peoples… To us there was also the strange brooding sense of another nature fostering a new race and a new age” (Harris, 1926) • “We are in the fringe of the great North and its living Whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, its call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America, and we Canadians, being closet to this source seem destined to produce an art somewhat different from our Southern fellows—an art more spacious, of a greater living quiet, perhaps of a more certain conviction of eternal values. We were not placed between the Southern teeming of men and the ample replenishing North for nothing” (Harris, 1926)

McMichael Gallery, Kleinburg, Ont • Bequeathed by Robert and Signe McMichael

THE JACK PINE Jonathan Bordo • Professor, Trent University, Cultural Studies From Voyageurs and Canoemen of the Assinniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition to Portaging a Canoe and Baggage (1858): people and place—the wilderness sublime

Frederick Varley Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (1920) and Indians Crossing Georgian Bay (1922): absence of human presence 1. Absence of human presence 2. Solitary tree 3. Human presence as symbolic deposit: anthropomorphism

Wilderness as sublime; wilderness as precinct Algonquin Wilderness League • Wilderness is an area where human activity is deliberately minimized, where non-human forces and forms of life remain virtually undisturbed by such activity. • Wilderness is a place where neither the permanent addition of artificial objects, nor the removal of natural objects shall result from human use. • Wilderness should be an ecological unit of a size sufficient to be essentially self-regulating. It should be large enough to ensure physical and psychological separation from the human-dominated environment. • As custodians of wilderness the human will exclude from such area: roads, permanent structures, mechanized equipment, trapping and hunting, natural resource extraction, any form of commercial exploitation, and any other form of disturbance which is incompatible with wilderness.

III: Emily Carr 1871-1945 • Began formal painting lessons at 16 • At 18 left to study art in San Francisco, and later lived in London and France • When back in Canada travelled to First Nations villages in coastal and central northern BC • 1927: introduced to Group of Seven through the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern • Later emphasis on writing; stopped painting in 1942

Anishinaabe artist, born on the Sand Point Ojibway Reserve First Aboriginal artist to break through in white art world Credited with founding “Woodland Indian art” or “x-ray art”: pictographic style IV: Norval Morrisseau (Copper Thunderbird), 1932-

V: Contemporary Artists Jin-me Yoon (1960-) born in Seoul, Korea Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996/7 Souvenirs of the Self, 1993 “Moving to Canada from Korea at the age of eight wa s ahugely significant event in my life … I have expended a great deal of energy since emigrating to Canada trying to understand who I was supposed to be in this place and coping with a nostalgic sense of loss. My body bears the burden of signification as an ‘Asian’ woman in the Canadian context… I think that I’ve inherited a whole history of discrimination and injustces against East Asians, especially the Japanese and Chinese in Canada. I was called a ‘chink’ and a ‘jap’ growing up in the late sixties and seventies” (Jin-me Yoon)

“Moving to Canada from Korea at the age of eight wa s ahugely significant event in my life … I have expended a great deal of energy since emigrating to Canada trying to understand who I was supposed to be in this place and coping with a nostalgic sense of loss. My body bears the burden of signification as an ‘Asian’ woman in the Canadian context… I think that I’ve inherited a whole history of discrimination and injustces against East Asians, especially the Japanese and Chinese in Canada. I was called a ‘chink’ and a ‘jap’ growing up in the late sixties and seventies” (Jin-me Yoon)

Brian Jungen (1970-) • Dàne-Zaa First Nations roots in Northwestern interior BC • Internationally recognized Prototype for a New Understanding Shapeshifter, 2005

"It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation. The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an 'authentic' native artifact." (Jungen)

Edward Burtynsky (1955-) • Born in St. Catherines, Ont. • Founded Toronto Image Works in 1985 • Featured in film, Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal “These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times” (Burtynsky)

JUG320S: The Canadian Wilderness