work of Firelei Báez</a>.</p><p>One of the most exciting painters of her generation, Báez delves into the historical narratives of the Atlantic Basin. Over the past fifteen years, she has made work that explores the multilayered explorations of the legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender and nationality in her paintings, drawings and installations. Her exuberant paintings feature finely wrought, complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration and saturated colour, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas. Báez’s investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking informs all her work, including her sculptural installations, which bring this quality into three dimensions.</p><p>This exhibition offers audiences a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Báez’s complex and profoundly moving body of work, cementing her as one of the most important artists of the early 21st century.</p><p><br></p>" itemprop="description" />

Emily Carr</a> (1871–1945) wrote about landscape paintings—her own and those of others—she would sometimes describe how an eye might move through the imagined space in the work. It is striking, then, that so many of her own paintings create an experience of dense, impenetrable forest that confounds such forward movement. In many cases, the viewer is tantalized with the opportunity of communion with a carefully observed natural environment, while simultaneously foiled in the prospect of imaginatively entering its depths.</p><p>In its exhibition design, Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape draws out the question of the opening and closing-off of space in Carr’s landscapes by contrasting a densely hung group of paintings with sparsely hung later works that depict an open horizon. Ironically, many of the spatially open works are open precisely because they depict landscapes that had been recently subject to clear-cut logging.</p><p>This exhibition uses the spatial metaphor of closeness to and distance from nature to probe Carr’s thinking about the forests she painted. It will also examine how Carr’s representation of some Indigenous subjects—particularly villages and totem poles set within landscapes—sit in relation to the dense forest and what this might suggest, given the late 19th- and early 20th-century tendency to conflate Indigenous cultures with nature.</p><p><br></p>" itemprop="description" />