The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Page 23

Vol. 57 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
159
gia raises the denigration as well of the
word “nostalgia.” In North American
usage, the term has come to refer to a
romantic sentimentality that freezes the
past and places it in the archives or curio
cabinet. Nadia Seremetakis describes this
cultural sense of “nostalgia” as precluding
the past from “any capacity for social
transformation in the present, preventing
the present from establishing a dynamic
perceptual relationship to its history.”9 She
contrasts this to the term’s original Greek
meaning with its evocation of journeys and
returns, of the maturation and ripening of a
taste, and of a burning pain in soul and
body. In Greek, nostalghfa is “the desire or
longing with burning pain to journey”
wherein the past, as it is transformed in the
present, attests to an “unreconciled histori-
cal experience.”10
The imagery of Island Souvenir res-
onates with an aura of the primordial, the
archetypal, the generically European. The
paintings conjure nostalgia, but not for
something that has ever been lived by the
artist. The notion of “unreconciled histori-
cal experience” comes closer to describing
memories of the memories belonging to
others. On the map of the world, repeated
like an invocation across the surface of
Banner with Lance, Iceland is missing. It is
an unsettling absence, even if it is one that
Icelanders themselves have had to learn to
tolerate. Maps are artefacts for locating
one’s self in the abstract geometry of lati-
tude and longitude. But instead of location,
this string of maps yields only a gap, a
silence. This, then, is the memory, the sou-
venir - the reminder of loss at the centre of
being.
Time of Consciousness
John Berger proposes that we live
between two times, one of the body that is
birthed, lives and dies, and the other the
time of consciousness.11 Our biology dri-
ves us inexorably toward death, while con-
sciousness moves relentlessly amidst past,
present, and future, making hesitant mean-
ings and provisional stories.
We now live in an era of contingency,
knowing that what exists at this moment
can quickly disappear. In modernity, we
have been directed to fragment experience
and create separate realms for emotion and
thought, body and mind, pleasure and pain.
It is, amongst other things, a coping mech-
anism, a story we tell ourselves about our-
selves. Nonetheless, beneath conscious
thought, these rent pairs are experienced as
alienated halves of a single entity—that is,
of the self.
In contemporary art practice, explo-
rations of the self and the problems of sub-
jectivity in an indeterminate world without
foundations are commonplace. Often they
probe the wound of living, using visual
imagery suggestive of pain, violence, and
alienation. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is
the quintessential example, its potency now
sadly spent by its commodified dissemina-
tion. Poignant examples abound, but at its
worst, this genre of art does little more
than pick at the sore with the tools of criti-
cal theory, diagnosing and describing an
inability to come to terms with a most
imperfect world.
Island Souvenir can be understood as
exploring the self as well, but it probes no
wound, displays no injury. Jonasson does
not intellectualize upon selfhood as if it
were an object removed from her own
experience. She creates art from thought-
fulness, not theory. She has worked out her
own, personal language to address the
world, reclaiming its experience in the face
of the loss at its core. The paintings can
evoke a sense of melancholy but they do
not induce in the viewer a chill; they are not
fraught or depressive. Rather, they are mit-
igated by an acceptance that comes from
the eventual recognition of the inevitability
of death in life. Each icon is thus implicat-
ed in the paradox of identity. Her art does
not propose any solution to that paradox
but it does help with the suturing of the
wound.
Of Forgetting and Desire
“I am thinking home is where
you choose to forget and choose to
remember at the same time.
Nothing hinders your choices.
Nothing forces you to remember