The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Side 24

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #4
and nothing forces you to forget.
There is no reason to repress mem-
ory. There is no reason to hold it
up against the daylight either.”
- Kristjana Gunnars
The Substance of Forgetting12
The severing of the Island canvas into
four quarters has an astute, organic feel to
it. Behind the gesture one senses a larger
meaning, and the mind tries to reassemble
the pieces, to recognize the original image
before it was torn asunder. What is it to
recall something in its entirety when all
that remains is a fragment, a trace, or a
residue? What feat of imagination is need-
ed to reassemble shards in order to recreate
the original object and bring it back to life?
Like archaeologists of the soul, we try piec-
ing together stories about ourselves, using
bits of memories reaching back to the time
of childhood when the world felt electric
with secrets. The recollected bits are eccen-
tric and serendipitous, the remains of a
child’s active mind making sense of the per-
plexing adult world. Do we make memo-
ries, or do they make us?
Growing up, we identify facets of our
personality as our uniqueness, to separate
our personal identity from that of others.
As adults, we examine what habits we have
acquired - the foods we like, the books we
read, and the desires we have - then specu-
late as to their origins. From where do they
come? A recent visit with a beloved uncle
made me wonder if I caught my own fasci-
nation for the North Atlantic from his
attachment to that region he could so rarely
visit except through his imagination. In
parting, he gave me a well-thumbed book
about Alfred the Great, King of Wessex. A
small and loving gesture, his gift marks a
lifetime of our connection that will not end
with his death. I have taken him into my
psyche, grafting his curiosity onto other of
my influences, assuring its immortality
even as it is transformed.
We used to speak of things bred in the
bone—or in Icelandic, eitthvad /blod bond
- but our metaphor for what is felt as our
abiding connection has now shifted to the
molecular level. In one painting, Jonasson
represents the popular version of the origi-
nal model of the Watson-Crick double
helix in replication. The new strands,
referred to as daughters, Jonasson has cho-
sen to sever so that they appear as a double
X, the code used for describing females.
Jonasson dedicates Island Souvenir to the
memory of her father, Dr. Harold David
Jonasson, who died in 1970 when he was 51
years of age and she sixteen. In her state-
ment, the artist writes that she took unfin-
ished paintings to her summer cottage,
where memories of her father entered into
the works’ making. Knowing this, the rela-
tionship between father and daughter
becomes a subtext for our own seeing, yet
here we must tread with care. We might be
tempted to think the sutures to be a refer-
ence to his medical practice, or diagnose
the figure in the bottom right corner of
Banner with Lance as a representation of
her grief for the loss of her father.
If encoded references to her own life
story were what these paintings contained,
however, they would not resonate with the
viewer as they, in fact, do. Another level of
reading is in order. The spiralling strand of
DNA is juxtaposed to seemingly disparate
symbols and images, suggesting another
grammar. Every mark, every figure, each
fragment making up these paintings, speaks
to the other, as if linked by an invisible
genealogy.
One can interpret these metaphoric ref-
erences in numerous ways. Given the con-
text of this exhibition and Jonasson’s
Icelandic and Ukrainian pasts, the immi-
grant connection between Europe and the
Canadian prairies comes to the fore. In this