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| By Stephanie Farrington Producer: Peter Severinson |
The National Gallery of Canada's Canadian collection curator Charlie Hill laughs. He is quoting Emily Carr, the subject of the National Gallery's summer exhibit this year. "It's really about seven shows in one," Hill says. The Carr show will trace her development as an artist as well as exploring her meaning through the scholars who have studied her work since her death. It's an expansive look at a single artist, the kind of show that is usually reserved for artists like Picasso or Monet. The Carr show caps off a season in which all the major shows at the National Gallery in Ottawa have been solo exhibits by Canadian artists. Hill says Carr is a "woman for every season." She was a painter, writer, feminist and proto-ecologist serving as a medium between native and non-native people. In the working wings of the gallery, a team of experts is getting Emily ready for her close-up. A big show, quickly Focusing on Emily Carr gave curators of Canadian art around the country a chance to fully explore our most studied artist.
"It's been in the works for only two years," Hill says. "So really it's come together quite quickly for a show of this size." The Gallery has devoted its entire temporary exhibit space to the show; it is almost a third larger than the Norval Morriseau show currently on display. Building the exhibit started with a model. Miniatures of the artwork are arranged in an all-white, painted scale model of the gallery that looks like a doll house. Hill discusses the plan as he leans over the model sitting on a low table in a cramped and windowless room filled with books and display materials. Curators arrange and rearrange the work inside the model until they think they have a fair idea of how the show will look, but it's always just a rough idea, Hill says. "Things always change once you get into the gallery." Damage control The first room of the show will reproduce a section of a major Canadian exhibit at the National Gallery in 1927 — which jump-started Carr's career. The challenge in this room will be that some of the original hooked rugs and painted masks can only withstand a fraction of the light the gallery would normally use to illuminate paintings on display. In the conservator's studio, works that recently arrived from other museums are laid out on tables to be cleaned and in some cases restored.
"Most paintings are cleaned using cotton swabs that are wound around a wooden stick like a giant Q-tip," says the gallery's chief conservator Stephen Gritt. Conservators use their own spit to moisten the cotton. "It's been done that way forever," he says. On a table marked with a handwritten sign that says; "do not touch, active flaking," lies one of Carr's forest works. It's on loan from another institution and it arrived with an unpleasant surprise — damage. Hill says he thinks there is another painting underneath. He points to a second signature on the underside of the frame, suggesting something else was there before the scene we see now. An X-ray could prove it but the piece is not the subject of any dispute so it will likely be restored, shown and returned to its home gallery with its mysteries intact. Emily Carr was never rich or even comfortable. Like many artists, she sometimes used her canvases more than once. She also used poor quality paper for some of her paintings, giving conservators an extra challenge. Her own history It's ironic that a show of this size and scope should be mounted for Emily Carr. During her lifetime she was particularly vocal about her mistrust of art critics and felt that the study and written criticism of her work was almost always off-base. "I hate reporters," she once said, "I'm going to write my own history." She did. This summer, through her painted history, Emily lives. The National Gallery of Canada's Emily Carr exhibit
opens on June 2 and will run until September.
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