Carel Moiseiwitsch
page from Codex Extirpation: The Sad Last Days of Homo Sapiens, 2024
vinyl, originally from artist book, ink on paper
Collection of the artist

Part of the exhibition Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital, this image is a page from Carel Moiseiwitsch’s artist book, Codex Extirpation: The Sad Last Days of Homo Sapiens, which she created for the exhibition. The text reads, “COMETS appeared in the heavens and they did fill the humans with great fear and foreboding, for whomever did see their firey trails across the night sky became afraid.”

Trained as a painter at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, England, Moiseiwitsch leaned into drawing after immigrating to Canada in the 1970s. Her distinctive punk graphic style was seen in a variety of contexts including galleries, underground comix, and newspaper editorials. Dedicated to progressive politics and social movements throughout her career, Moiseiwitsch’s formal style matched the political urgency of her subjects: feminism, institutional racism and colonialism in all its forms.

In 2011, Moiseiwitsch relocated from Vancouver to Lytton, BC. In 2021, a wildfire destroyed the entire town and with it her home and her life’s work. Forced back to the city from the country as a climate refugee, in Vancouver she returned to painting—landscape painting in particular. Once too genteel a proposition for the artist, scenes of a landscape on fire, fueled by human-caused climate change, have become a particularly urgent subject.

The insignificant yet destructive nature of human activity is the subject of the artist book Codex Extirpation. A return to form for Moiseiwitsch, this pen and ink artist book recounts the myriad ways humans will be driven (or more precisely, have driven themselves) to extinction. Moiseiwitsch’s painting Blue Comet is also being shown at the Belkin as part of the Town + Country exhibition. Similarly, this work references the enduring art historical practice of depicting a comet as a harbinger of doom. Here the comet is possibly an omen of the historic heat dome which fueled the Lytton fire and countless fires that summer, reinforcing the planetary and galactic forces far greater than our human lives on earth.

This presentation of Carel Moiseiwitsch’s work is a collaboration with the Walter C. Koerner Library made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that challenges our perceptions about the world around us.