The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Side 21

Vol. 57 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
157
thinking, emphasizing diagnosis and dis-
covery over a concern with creation. Like
Enlightenment philosophy in general,
artistic inquiry delves into the mind more
so than questions of being. This can favour
the intellectual at the cost of the emotional,
which at times appears to be the goal.
Jonasson works in an older tradition of
painting, still intellectual but thoughtful as
well, one that concerns itself with the time-
less and with deeper existential meanings.
She turns the analytical bits into particular
experiential metaphors by leaving them
open to interpretation. Her visual tech-
nique allows for the music of chance to res-
onate between object and viewer.
Jonasson describes her artistic process as
the reverse of archaeology and Freud’s
archaeological metaphor for probing mem-
ory: rather than digging through layers to
find the origin, she reveals a deeper level at
which meaning is organized, by building
up layers of paint until the image emerges.
She describes this process as akin to medi-
tation, a dialogue between her and the ini-
tial marks she lays on canvas and board.
There’s no goal to represent something
already known, but knowing comes
through her relation with the materials.
Only when the work is close to completion
does she recognize the form that it has
taken.
References to sciences that think time
and conceptualise the past repeat within
Island Souvenir. Geology, archaeology,
genealogy, history, genetics, and psycho-
analysis manifest as, for example, lava-like
surfaces and stratified edges, or pre-mod-
ern artefacts like a carved stirrup and a sod
house. In one way or another, these sci-
ences show a contemporary concern with
beginnings, with creations - of the earth, a
society, a family, a persona. The first cre-
ation, of the universe, can also be read in
the now-quartered island images, like
gaseous clouds out of which matter
formed. The search for beginnings posits
the hope that there is something to which
everything returns, a fundament or univer-
sal, perhaps even a guarantee of future
redemption. It also suggests that time is
knowable. Beginnings raise a conundrum,
however, since one can’t stop wondering,
what came before time? The mind cannot
think nothingness. The artist gives us one
possible place of resolution, in the watery
imagery surrounding each island. Water is
a metaphor for creation as well as emotion,
suggestive of cleansing and beginning
again, but also of the amniotic fluid from
which we all emerge. Here birth and the
process of artistic creation flow together,
suggesting that the particular - the birth of
the individual - and the universal - the
ongoing cycles of death and rebirth - bear
a family resemblance.
Material Remains
Notions of objects and images moving
through time and marking its passage fol-
low naturally upon considerations of time
and timelessness. The title word “souvenir”
opens onto another grammar of Jonasson’s
art that explores ideas of transmission and
communication, possession and loss. The
English word “souvenir” derives from the
French “memory” or “to remember,”
which derives in turn from the Latin “sub-
venire”, to occur to the mind. According to
Susan Stewart, the souvenir “speaks to a
context of origin through a language of
longing, for it is not an object arising out of
need or use value; it is an object arising out
of the necessarily insatiable demands of
nostalgia.”7 Possessing an object or
memento is a way of remembering a place
or person, and of retaining a bond or sen-
sation despite separation. The souvenir is
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