Carel Moiseiwitsch

Moiseiwitsch is well known for her print-based and graphic art practice, creating politically charged illustrations, prints, and alternative comics. This body of material stands as part of a long tradition of artists registering social protest in their work, including Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, Georg Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Sue Coe, and the broadsheet works of Jose Guadalupe Posada. Moiseiwitsch works in affordable multiple formats and frequently takes inequality and violence in historical and contemporary social life as subject. Moiseiwitsch's editorial illustrations have been featured in a variety of publications, including The Georgia Straight, The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, The Economist, Middle East Report, Rip Off Comix, Wimmin's Comix, Raw, Real Stuff, Twisted Sisters, and Weirdo. One example of this graphic practice is the alternative comic O Canada Our Home and Native Land (1985), which highlights the history of Japanese-Canadian internment during and after World War II, detailing the violence and human rights violations of internment and the failure of the Canadian government to acknowledge this history or compensate Japanese-Canadians in the aftermath. Moiseiwitsch's graphic art works have also been shown in exhibition contexts, such as the lithograph Untitled (Four Black Jets) which was included in the BOMBHEAD exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Moiseiwitsch employed print-based media and graphic art as a form of witnessing and documenting what she saw while visiting Occupied Palestinian Territories, which she exhibited in the 2003 Life in Occupied Palestine exhibition at grunt gallery. She and her partner Gordon Murray were sued by Canwest in 2007 for creating a parody of The Vancouver Sun that aimed to highlight anti-Palestinian biased reporting in Canwest's papers. Moiseiwitsch also works in painting, employing an expressionistic style and touching on subjects of gender politics and environmental degradation. Her practice often pushes back against the dominance of conceptualism in the local and global art scene, with the goal of highlighting other functions of art such as communicating the artist's felt or emotional experience of the world.