Real Unsettled

Applying magic realism – a term closely linked with Latin American literature – to the work of Walter Phillips, an English-born settler living in early-twentieth century Canada, may seem unexpected. His solemn landscapes of tree-ringed lakes, mossy forests, and stately mountains, rendered in lines both delicate and incisive, seem rooted in a realist and naturalist tradition, untouched by the fantastical.

Magic realism was coined by German art critic and photographer Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a surge of post-Expressionist art that returned to realism but retained undercurrents of the extraordinary. Over time, Latin American writers and critics extended the term to define a literary genre that challenged Eurocentric assumptions of time, space, dimensionality, objectivity and what counts as “real.” Because of its distortion of reality, magic realism has often been used to read artworks by Indigenous artists. Unlike surrealism, fantasy, or the gothic – which foreground dream states, inner worlds, the macabre and grotesque – magic realism manifests itself through the mundane.

This exhibition presents the work of Walter Phillips alongside other Canadian artists whose representational artworks lean toward realism, yet subtly (or not so subtly) unsettle the familiar through unexpected formal strategies, unusual subject matter, or the capacity to evoke wonder and unease. Bringing Phillips into dialogue with these selected works from the WAG’s collection prompts us to view his landscapes through the lens of magic realism, to find moments of slippage, or fracturing, that unsettles our assumptions of reality and the familiar.