Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey

Over the past three decades, Vancouver-based painter Landon Mackenzie has produced an impressive body of large-scale painting that addresses the way we situate ourselves in the world. This exhibition traces correlations between different bodies of her work and the paintings of Emily Carr, an artist who has been a touchstone for Mackenzie throughout her career.

Taking its title from images in both artists’ work, the exhibition uses the wood chopper as a metaphorical figure who “clears a path” for those to come and the monkey as an emblem of the sense of loss and whimsy that is rarely discussed in Carr’s work.

Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the complex relationship between the works of these two artists. The catalogue is published by the Vancouver Art Gallery and includes a text by the renowned Emily Carr scholar Gerta Moray, Art History professor at the University of Guelph.

About Emily Carr
Emily Carr is one of Canada’s most renowned artists. Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr trained in San Francisco, London and France. Her first important body of work was executed in 1912 when, using the new sense of colour and paint handling she developed in France in 1911, she turned her attention to the totemic art of the First Nations of British Columbia. This work was not well received when it was first exhibited in 1913 and for many of the years that followed she rarely painted. In 1927 she was included in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern at the National Gallery of Canada, where her work was widely praised. Encouraged by fellow artists, notably Lawren Harris, Carr returned to painting and continued to paint actively until 1942, when ill health curtailed her practice. In later life, she devoted more time to writing; her first book, Klee Wick won the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 1941. She is best known for her attention to the totemic carvings of the First Nations people of British Columbia and the rain forests of Vancouver Island.

About Landon Mackenzie
Landon Mackenzie’s widely acclaimed large-scale canvases and works on paper have appeared in more than ninety exhibitions in Canada and abroad and are represented in the collections of art museums across the country, including the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has taught at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design for more than twenty-five years, where she was the recipient of the inaugural Ian Wallace Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009.