The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Page 18

154
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #4
Island Souvenir I
cal explorations, they bring together and
transmute a lifetime of influences and expe-
riences into visual form. In this regard,
Jonasson’s art is comparable to the poetry
of Stephan G. or the writings of Kristjana
Gunnars, another Icelander more recently
transplanted in Canada, whose novel
Substance of Forgetting this essay’s title
invokes.
This link to literature I highlight inten-
tionally. Part of Jonasson’s inspiration
comes through the printed word via a vora-
cious, wide-ranging reading habit. She has
worked for fifteen years as image editor
and art director for the western Canadian
literary journal Prairie Fire. I first got to
know her not as an anthropologist who
works in Iceland and with Icelandic-
Canadians, but rather in my other role as
writer about Canadian art: Louise edited
my essay on the Winnipeg-based painter
Eleanor Bond. That I should now, with this
meditation on her work, have the opportu-
nity to bring together these two streams of
my life is itself a privilege. But there’s more
to it, since Winnipeg and Reykjavik are the
two places that anchor me in the world
even though my present fate prevents my
living in either one. Thus the themes of dis-
placement, loss, remembrance, and accep-
tance that permeate Jonasson’s art resonate
for me in personal as well as more broadly
cultural ways. They reach beyond talk of
immigrant histories to underscore the spo-
radic ruptures that in one way or another
rent the fabric of our lives. As the art essay-
ist John Berger comments, the opposite of
love is separation, not hate.2
Jonasson writes of a phoenix rising from
ashes and Stephan G. proposes golden
tablets surviving Ragnarok. The coinci-
dence of their metaphors is suggestive: true
artists hungrily consume everything life
offers them while their art creates meaning
from the flames of that mental and materi-
al chaos. As if the incarnation of Stephan
G.’s tablets, Jonasson’s paintings evoke the
form of the book (one senses the heft of
large vellum manuscripts) but have also the
palpability of stone slabs. Their three-