The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Page 19

Vol. 57 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
155
Island Souvenir II
dimensional quality produced by various
actions, whether carving, scraping away or
layering paint, makes these works cross
into the realm of sculpture. In this subtle
manner, their materiality tempts the viewer
to touch them. At the same time, their sen-
sual beauty and metaphorical richness
touch something standing deeper in the
soul.
In Island Souvenir, the artist explores a
cross-cultural array of symbols and icons
in order to effect reflection on the psycho-
logical and cultural processes of making
meaning in the world while in the midst of
experiencing it. The act of looking at the
paintings exemplifies these processes. The
mind tries to place the various images in
relation to one another, but no narrative
from the “real” world suggests itself. Yet
they hint at something remembered, or
perhaps familiar, as in deja vu. Condensed,
elegiac; concurrently material, metaphori-
cal, and metaphysical: the paintings’ logic is
more like the poem, their intimacy that of
the dream. Jonasson’s artistry assumes
about human thought what the dry lan-
guage of cognitive science now acknowl-
edges to be the case: namely, that “the mind
is inherently embodied, thought is mostly
unconscious, and abstract concepts are
largely metaphorical.”3 The dream, the
poem, the painting come closest to speak-
ing a language of the body.
As landscapes of the imagination evok-
ing Icelandic culture and history, the paint-
ings of Island Souvenir portray what
Jonasson has never seen except through
photographs, books, and the fragmented
images inherited from immigrant grand-
parents and passed to her through her
father - to the memory of whom these
paintings are dedicated. In this sense, they
may be thought of as memories of memo-
ries, as well as meditations upon the actions
of memory and forgetting, of time and how
we dwell in it. They bear the melancholy of
loss yet there’s acceptance as well, a coming
to terms with the past as it persists in the
present.
In her name - Gilda Nadia Louise