The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Page 20

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #4
Jonasson - the artist carries fragments of
two histories, of Iceland and Ukraine. Her
name interweaves the lives of those who
quit old lands in an era of recurrent part-
ings to voyage westward, seeking another
future, or fleeing the past, or both at once.
The names Island and Island Souvenir
carry parallel traces that epitomize how
cultures extend themselves into the world
through their images and objects as well as
through people themselves. An island is “at
once a place of a fresh start, a clean slate,
and a colony in which a resettlement of tra-
dition is bound to occur.”4 Souvenirs are
the things - mementos, photos, stories -
which give material form to what the heart
desires never to forget. These souvenirs
acquire their own agency and transform as
they enter the flow of various life journeys.
In Icelandic, Minning um eyu evokes the
image of an island—“Iceland within,” as
Svavar Gestsson calls it—carried in the
mind’s eye when the land itself has long
been abandoned.
Origin of Naming
Unlike photographs that can freeze in
time the appearance of a moment, paintings
have the power to portray what is invisible
to the eye yet nonetheless is sensed to exist.
The paintings of Island Souvenir give visu-
al form to the underlying structures of
being, to metaphysical bedrock. When, in
looking, I give myself over to them
(savouring their rich, earthy hues and
engraved surfaces, contemplating what
images of wood, stone, metal, and water
can recall), 1 slip into a state seemingly
between waking and sleeping, where word
John Harvard, MP
arleswood St. James-Assiniboia
Chair, Northern &
Western Caucus
_______________________________
H 3050 Portage Ave.
Winnipeg, MB R3K 0Y1
Ph: (204) 983-4501
/ : Fax: (204) 983-4728
f- www.johnharvard.com
Room 774 Confederation Bldg. • Ottawa, ON Kl A 0A6
Ph: (613) 995-5609 • Fax: (613) 992-3199
harvaj@parl.gc.ca
and meaning are one, where reality takes
on the quality of myth. John Berger calls
this “the place of original naming,” where a
person contacts in the marrow of their
being the ground of origin: the moment not
of birth but of conception. All is innocent,
timeless, and unparticular.5
In Island, the paint’s application—the
canvas is distressed, abraded, the pigment
layered and the surface worked to grey and
white—sensually renders the effects of
weathering, as if little flakes of the island
were eroding bit by bit. Both technique
and appearance thus mimic the workings of
time. Swaddled human figures form a mar-
ginal register, intimating the presence of
others. Like guardians, like ghosts, like
just-born babies wrapped in swaddling. Or
maybe they are bundled up mummies, pre-
served for eternity. In a contrary move,
they could also be new lives emerging from
chrysalides. These deliberately ambiguous
figures occupy a space where up and down
have no reference, and temporality is
uncertain. Do they surround the island and
represent the “real” world of our senses?
Or do they denote a timeless, invisible
underpinning briefly rising into view?
In both Island and Island Souvenir, the
tension between time and timelessness
forms a dynamic motif that connects to the
sense of contingency with which we inhab-
it the present. Elsewhere Berger writes that,
until the general acceptance of Darwinian
evolutionary theory over the last one hun-
dred years, time had been experienced as
“infiltrated by timelessness.” A painting’s
stillness symbolized that timelessness, and
provided one point of contact—along with
“ritual, stories, and ethics” - between the
profane world of time and the sacred sub-
stratum of the timeless and enduring.6
Since technology and evolutionary think-
ing began to pervade our common sense,
we have accepted as normal that change
typifies existence, and that the forward
movement of time rather than timelessness
is the substance of the universe.
In contemporary art, this shift in cultur-
al understanding manifests itself in the dis-
placement of painting as the paramount art
form. Further, the trajectory of painting
and other media has been toward analytical