Rachel Kalpana JAMES

Dialogue between contemporary and historical art can provide us with new ways to consider the past. Here, South-Asian Canadian artist Rachel Kalpana JAMES' immersive contemporary installation highlights a moment of East-West interaction in the early 20^th century.

Her work focuses on the 1929 visit to Canada by Rabindranath Tagore¹, a celebrated Indian poet and educator whose philosophies resonated with themes of spirituality and nature. While the question of Tagore's influence on Canadian artists, particularly Group of Seven members like Lawren S. Harris and Fredrick Varley, has been largely overlooked, JAMES' installation serves as a space for reconsideration.

Using an interplay of media, JAMES pairs stylized handheld footage of foliage with text from Tagore’s poems and newspaper clippings mentioning his Canadian visit. The pulsing words on screen, reminiscent of a heartbeat or newsreel, foster a sense of urgency and immediacy. Meanwhile, distorted images of the iconic landscape – recalling elements depicted by the Group of Seven – subtly question the established artistic narrative. Projected on a chalked background, the installation oscillates between the documentary and the imagined, blurring the lines between history and fiction. Encouraging viewers to question how history is perceived, JAMES' work invites us to re-examine the relationship between colonial and national narratives in Canadian art.

Discover this installation in the exhibition Visions and Views: Landscape and Abstraction in the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art on Level 2!

¹ Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) was a poet, educator, and social reformer. In 1913, he became the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his collection of poetry Gitanjali. Tagore was also a strong proponent of educational reform, which was the topic of his 1929 visit to Canada, where he addressed a conference of the National Council of Education of Canada in Vancouver. His visit drew large crowds, and a reporter from The Canadian Theosophist deemed him “the bright oriental star of the occasion.” (Vol. X, No. 3, May 15, 1929)

Image: Rachel Kalpana JAMES, Bright Oriental Star (detail), 2011, multi-media installation (video, 8 min). Collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery: purchased with the support of the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Program, a program of the Gordon Foundation and administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation, 2022.