A original new look at the life and art of Emily Carr and her relationship to the international art of her time “I had an interesting French Artist to see me this summer”: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia brings together new research concerning the French/Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), and the great Canadian modernist, Emily Carr (1871-1945), both of whom dedicated their most productive years to what Paalen called “the direct visualization of the forces which move our body and mind.” Accompanying an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery scheduled for July 1 to November 13, 2016, the catalogue will tell the story of how both artists met in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1939, and how the creative vision of each one expanded in reaction to the landscape and the monumental art of the Northwest Coast First Nations. The catalogue will present an essay by the scholar Colin Browne, ancillary archival materials, as well as full colour reproductions of both early and late works by both artists as they moved toward their transcendent visions.

With objects assembled from public and private collections internationally, this first pairing of these two modernist painters is being organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, and curated by Colin Browne.

Clint Burnham is widely published as a critical theorist, poet, and author of books on digital culture. He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery and Fredric Jameson, a novel titled Smoke Show (2005), and several books of poetry, including The Benjamin Sonnets (2009). His most recent critical book is The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2012). His most recent art writing includes a catalogue essay on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood; an essay on Edward Burtynsky is in the forthcoming Petrocultures collection from McGill-Queens. During a residency at the Urban Subjects Collective in Vienna in 2014–15, he wrote books on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture, and on Fredric Jameson and Wolf of Wall Street.Burnham is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy. He is a founding member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon.

Colin Browne's profile page