Her first solo exhibition in the UK at the Dulwich Picture Gallery comes far too late, as the popular artist from Canada died 69 years ago; nevertheless, it is a clear display of Emily Carr’s essence. Her landscape canvases are revelations. Their meaning is absorbed by their visual representation and vice versa. They deny any distance between the painter’s inner space and her spatial surrounding, the territory of British Columbia.

The show paves the way for a light and at times illuminating wandering among her faraway achievements. Carr’s preferred topics for discussion sit next to each other in the gallery: mostly oils on papers or canvases of the Canadian rain forest, its trees and undergrowth are hung above masks, ritual objects and reproductions of First Nations’ culture arranged on tables. For most of her life, her desire for human proximity was exclusively addressed to groups of Indians living on the West Coast of Canada. The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to paintings of totems and traditional Indian emblems. Born in 1871 in the newly formed Canadian Confederation from English parents, Carr’s practice sought asylum in the Haida society.

During her visit to the community of Ucluelet on the Vancouver Island, Carr received the name Klee Wyck, the Laughing One. Her playful side is shown buy her choice of a colorful palette and shimmering tones of blue and green. The 1912 painting Indian War Canoe is composed by fervent shades and evocative strokes that recall her encounter with post-impressionist and Fauvist techniques during her studies in France in 1910. Blunden Harbour from 1930 is placed in the same section of the exhibition and yet it conveys a divergent feeling with a more affecting effect: based on a earlier photograph, this canvas illuminates a dying culture. In this painting, Carr removed the native people of the photograph and let the totems of their village speak. Isolated in time and space, these monstrous statues loom out of the past into the present.

Rhythm, weight, space and force were the principles guiding Carr’s practice; today these qualities are joined by the fascination for her extraordinary story. The Dulwich Picture Gallery guarantees a thoughtful consideration of her work, without covering too many specialist details and thus avoiding the visitor feeling confused and disorientated, which frequently recurs in retrospectives. The show exhibits hints of beauty without satisfying the audience’s appetite, perhaps facilitated in this by Carr’s artistic activity.

If one section is occupied by her timid experimentation with drawing, illustrated books and cubist compositions, a larger part of the exhibition is enriched by her studies on her land, woods and especially trees. These paintings are the worthwhile pinnacle of her career and of this retrospective. “I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people”, the sulky artist famously affirmed. Works such as Wood Interior, Indian Church and Tree embody Carr’s restless yearning for reality. She felt empathy towards nature, towards the forest which she preferred for its unadulterated pureness and bounty.

Her landscape subjects appear to be put in motion by a supernatural force, perhaps Carr’s own desire to get closer and join them in their uncontaminated oscillation. Windswept Trees from 1934 is an oil and gasoline work on paper magnificently overwhelmed by a spiral of emotions. A blow of air takes over the central tree and spins around the whole painting; influenced by Van Gogh shimmering objects, Carr developed his style further and made her strokes longer. The browns, greens and yellows are not colour but tangible movement. Carr’s images excel because their dynamic nature suggests the passage of time. Despite being fixed in a specific space and time, her work illuminates a sequence of moments: the Canadian artist’s windswept creations allow what came before and after them to be seen.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery concludes with Carr’s paintings of the sea and the sky. While paradoxically her maritime artworks are static and inanimate, her skyscapes encapsulate her movement away from the human landscape, towards the transcendence offered by silence, isolation and the harmony of the earth.

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until the 15 March 2015.

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Travel down to the third floor to sit before the looped screening of Ben River’s Creation As We Saw It, 2012 and look up: you’ll see the colourful, elephant-faced undercarriage of The Three Fold Law. Drained a little of its bright variety by the silvery ambience in the room, it nevertheless retains the characteristically kaleidoscopic quality of Harper’s painting: tunnel-visions through mutating organic forms, some natural, some imaginary. Smaller works by Harper can be peered at—sadly from quite a distance—in the adjacent stair well. Abloom and fading, the disorientating detail of the vivid, butterfly-print images of buds, branches, creeping stems and vegetable rot seem to keep metamorphosing into Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits, tribal masks and hollowing animal craniums. Creation as we see it.

River’s film tells us sweet, sad creation stories over scenes of modern day life: a modern day that is a combined world of the old and the new, ancient and modern. Using purposefully archaic technology, Rivers’ hand-developed, 16mm film silently narrates the myth of a volcano’s birth on the island of Tanna of the Republic of Vanuatu, the bringing of fire and the beginnings of human life in one of the worlds oldest known settlements. A lasting interest in the forgotten secrets, the mothers of myth in pre-history appears to be the curational topic at hand, yet it is a messy, indiscriminate wealth of time that flows throughout the exhibition, overlaying the contemporary with the historical. A time before time becomes a forever present; something we reach behind the scenes for, underneath, digging fingernails into the basal mess. Time is just another ambiguous construct alongside the real and the imaginary, consciousness facing the ambivalence of the natural world.

The amorality of nature—the disinterested, essential and unifying force at work in many of the included artists work—underpins River’s interest in alternative ways of living that are neither utopia not dystopia; totally ordinary yet remarkable places. Often filming exceptional individuals or singular communities, Rivers is drawn to places that are distinctively authored and shaped by the people he films, documenting the reality and the possibilities of our fictions. Camera led, eyes rest on close up portraits of the island’s contemporary inhabitants—a boy rides a bike in circles; bare shoulder blades open and close as man claps—he swings his arms, unheard and walks along a tree-shaded path; another, older man, masticates in the doorway of his house, trying not to laugh self-consciously under his hat. Inter-cut by the fable of pig and man, their exchange of limbs, short and long, a woman rubs the belly of a blissful, dusty hog. In another shot, the curious curl of a human toe nested above the other detracts attention from the animal skull that hangs above the foot. Picking out detail within disarray; depicting creation as we see it.

Primordial or post-apocalyptic landscapes or both, strange fictions, organic and geological, continue to evolve throughout the exhibition: places bound by natural forms yet authored, manipulated and mythologised. Journeying further down towards the centre of the earth, the second floor displays sculptural specimens from the veins of volcanoes, the fungal growths and sedimentary build-up of wet caverns, and the pulsating ocean floor. Salvatore Arancio’s ceramics gasp hot, guttural names like Ah-ah, 2015 or the electronic rhythm of Ziwzih Ziwzih Oo-oo-oo, 2012; are called after tiny ancient crustaceans, living fossils such as Triop, 2005; or simply state their form as in Holes, 2015—sea-bottom calcite tubers popping open to extend modelling compound limbs. A graphic photo-etching on the wall states its subject: An active volcano summit in the valley of stones, 2011. While Arancio’s work dominates the room, the odd pairing with Caroline Achaintre textile work is less peculiar than it first appears. I can imagine them both pouring through books for curious images, editing and combining and elaborating their sources to create hybrid objects. The man-made fuses with the natural in Arancio’s sculptures, reinterprets found images using a combinations of new and ‘outdated’ techniques in his etchings, while geometric ink blots on printed paper transform natural geologies into something synthetic and strange. Achaintre’s woolen zebra pelt, Zibra, 2011, is a similarly re-sourced modern exoticism: the animal pattern crafted into an angular geometry of hand-tufted wool, zigzags of blue and gold invading the black and white regulation in a dramatic, and slightly absurd, combined order. Creation as we make it.

Down, down on the ground floor, or the first floor, at the beginning and the end ,is another seemingly odd coupling between Jack Strange and Vidya Gastaldon. As much as Strange is sincere in his humour, poking fun at and through visual manipulations—how we visualise ourselves and our relation to the world around us through things, including art—Gastaldon has humour in her sincerity. Her allegorical drawings, inspired by sacred Hindu texts, are littered with pop references and drug culture, not least the acid smiley—a contemporary payote for the modern day mystic. Said by the artist to represent a non-duality or cosmic unity of good and evil, Gastaldon’s pale drawings hatch within papery voids like planets being born, cells growing in a Petri dish or terrine-like bubble worlds, evolving microcosms living and dying in the vastness of the universe. The elephant within Ulephant, 2006, is revealed in particulates of rock formations and tree-trunks, serially blossoming within the landscape: mountains and planet strewn skies divided by a horizon line that delves into a subterranean world. In Fire and Emptiness Flight, 2008, both ghostly spirits seem essential to the other, creating space underneath a densely buried but bejewelled cosmos. Such apocryphal binds of creation and destruction trail thematically throughout the The First Humans and yet, as in Gastaldon’s work, these binaries are subsumed by an overpowering ambivalence between them, like the entangled symmetry of Harper’s painting or the tragic birth of a volcano that forms the world: the dualism of beauty and decadence, life and death, utopia and dystopia, the sardonic or knowingly cliché, and a true, mystical sincerity. Ambiguity trickles down the inside of this re-purposed, post-industrial pillar like good-natured laughter.

There are a just lot of eyes in this first/last room, looking, grinning, laughing. From the spirits sketched in pencil and graphite in Gastaldon’s watercolour bled drawings to Strange’s series of paired tumble stones, each inserted into rectangular cardboard sheets, a deadpan host of level gazes from the back wall. Entitled, What do you want more of? (I)–(XXIII), 2010, each stone is supposedly imbued with different desirable characteristics. They remind me of birth stone earrings piercing cardboard backing in a craft shop: material, objects, on which to project ourselves and our meaning on, or take some meaning from and award it to ourselves. How easily manipulated have I been by the work in this psychedelic exhibition? Seeing faces, gods, archetypal myths, an exotic state of nature (neither Edens, utopias nor disinterested dystopias), and exotic, carnival incarnations: documented fictions of the pre-historical and primitive. The confounding cliché of creation as we see it, as we see ourselves in relation to the world: aliens, apes, cavemen—the bizarre characters that Strange rattles around dressed up as inside Lump Inside a Lump, 2012, a video set into a clumsy papier-mâché boulder.

On entering the Pump House, the wall text directs your thoughts downwards before you journey up through the four rooms of the exhibition, asking you to think about the grounds of London, the fertile muck of time and the swampy land that once was—that which fuelled the defunct power station nearby, a site currently undergoing phase of moneyed, metropolitan development and property speculation —from the equally repurposed art gallery in a city park. There is a hint of JG Ballard’s alternative Londons; psychedelic journeys through the looking glass of modern urbanity where civilisation becomes entwined with the primordial and we catch sight of ourselves growing, dripping with it, acting within a transformational landscape. Authored landscapes in metamorphosis. Creation as we see it, as we over-write it, as we see ourselves, at the beginning and the end: the first humans.

The First Humans is at Pump House Gallery from the 22 January until 27 March 2015.

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This is what Pop Art will forever represent; this knowledge will forever be regurgitated. Yet, the new show at Saatchi allows us to see beyond this, to the ongoing impact that Pop Art has had. Specifically, we can see the impact not only on art being made now, but also upon the work that was being made in Russia and in China, in societies where Communist propaganda was the main source of visual imagery and capitalist values were stigmatised.

But first, let me lead you through the first couple of rooms and the work shown under the umbrella heading of ‘Habitat’. That riot of colour that, for me, was one of the defining features of Pop Art, seemed to be non-existent, at least in the first room. It was curiously muted, almost as though saturation point had already been reached. The love affair with commodity that Pop Art had exemplified had been stripped down to neutral colours and oversized objects; it had been rendered as something big and ridiculous, as well as bare. For me, it seemed to mock the present day’s obsession with consumer goods as something inflationary and overvalued. There was an overblown sink (with wings) on the wall, and a marble armchair in which Ai Wei Wei had crafted the most exquisite creases. There was a mattress, toilet rolls cast in plaster and an unfinished installation from Ilya Kobakov: paint cans and pieces of wood, with plans lying around. It was almost as though the promise of what something could be was greater than its realisation. It left me pondering the relevance of this in real life, where the idea of owning something was perhaps more exciting than actually obtaining it.

The work moved away from ‘Habitat’ to work devoted to advertising. This is where the mood changed. It moved from the celebration and satirisation of objects in the home to an all out visual offensive, which is only natural when you consider the inescapable medium of advertising. It was overwhelming. Arcade games popped and pinged. Posters plastered to the wall offered the chance to sell your soul, while Chairman Mao was depicted as an enormous figure in a static computer game piece opposite. Here, we start to see the tropes of Pop Art being appropriated by the East: Lenin is the “Real Thing” of Coca Cola and Marlborough’s iconic cigarette packaging has been replaced with “Malevich” and a black square. The work makes you laugh; the mix of dissidence with well-known imagery is slick. Even without the extra layer of mocking the Communist regimes, the Western work that sits amongst this is mocking in its own way, by reflecting back to us the well-worn images of material possessions. We see different humours, but they are united in their critical nature. The critique follows through to religion; the iconography of religious paintings has been blackened out, your focus drawn to a repeated pattern of tins of caviar. Faith, it seems, is garnering less respect than the premise of goods, and lots of them.

There were many such pastiches of advertising, from beautiful oil paintings with Chinese script, to Dr Martens adverts that have been replaced with very low quality images of soldiers wearing boots in the snow. Consumerism and Communism are brought together: Mickey Mouse holds hands with Lenin and Jesus; Komar and Melamid’s big red flag of Soviet Realism flies boldly in a very traditional oil painting; and the hammer and sickle becomes a hammer and a big silver dollar sign. What I became more and more aware of, as I walked through the rooms, is that, although polar opposites in terms of politics, both the world of advertising and Socialist propaganda are trying to sell you an ideology. There is an ease with which propaganda has been turned into a Pop Art pastiche, and it highlights the similarities of style and ideals of both. They want to be liked. They are both trying to sell something, whether that is a product or a way of life, they want you to be sold by the idealised (and often false) projections of these images.

And still, there were more works. They kept on coming, as though the breadth of Pop Art’s reach is wider than you could possibly think. The work looked at sex, religion, at art made for art’s sake. A contemporary icon is the simple ‘f’ of Facebook that has been transformed into a giant bronze statue. It commands reverence. And maybe, in contemporary society, that is what this little icon has instilled in us. The figures of traditional statues have been carved as wearing Communist style clothing. There were the singed embers of works by Warhol, Rauschenberg and Johns, amongst others. One photograph showed a city landscape constructed mostly with dildos. And yet, this was one area where I lost interest. We are so saturated with images of this nature that it no longer seems shocking, which is perhaps as strong a sentiment for Post-Pop as any—the proliferation of this sort of imagery and how mundane this now appears. Yet, this is a sentiment for Post-Pop as viewed in the UK, by someone that has forever been surrounded by this type of imagery. Taken out of its Western context however, this work would probably not be greeted with such a worn down fatigue.

There was more work than I could possibly comment on and this could almost be the very definition of the impact of Post Pop: vast and all encompassing. Its influence in Russia was seen in the development of Sots Art, where East and West were fused together, and in China, the outcome was Political Pop, where Americanised imagery became galvanised with state approved propaganda. In the work from the East, we see the images of the everyday being transcended into works of art. It is just that these were not images of consumer durables as in the West; they were images of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao with hoards of happy children. Amongst the direct pastiches, there are glorious hints of dissidence. This is perhaps what Pop Art’s legacy is, to allow the context of well-known images to be subverted. It’s reach spreads across religious, sexual and political imagery and it has been shown to be colourful, humourous and buoyant. I wouldn’t want to know a world without it.

Post Pop: East Meets West is on at the Saatchi Gallery until 3 March 2015.

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