The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Blaðsíða 25

Vol. 57 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
161
reading, the paintings suggest the working
through of larger cultural forces that make
possible a psychical possession of a strange
environment. They explore how memories
pass along lineages, of how cultures
remember, of how other places are
dreamed into being. The immigrant makes
a new home in a strange world with bits of
memory—photos, souvenirs, and other
shards of another life. There is no line con-
necting this new land to the immigrant’s
ancestors. The dead are dead and gone;
they are buried elsewhere. This is a loss
that one can never retrieve.
The immigrant’s child or grandchild has
a paradoxical relation with the ancestor’s
homeland. Being an immigrant’s child
grants the liberty to pick and choose out of
all that one has been told, and reassemble
these bits and pieces into an “Iceland of the
mind” or a “Ukraine of the mind.” One
can take a story and map it onto one’s sense
of self, in order to identify with it as the
primal truth of self-authenticity. There is
dreaminess to this imagining. It makes a
mental space but it has no physicality. As a
child, the first generation passes their long-
ings to you. The child takes it in as exotic
knowledge that is truer than anything. It
becomes a mystery inside one’s self. But as
the child gets older, the questions start to
come. Why, if the homeland was so won-
derful, did people leave? There occurs then
a loss of the idea of the homeland’s reality:
like a homunculus inside one’s self, it never
had a chance to be birthed. It remains a
mythical landscape, a source of solace, a
place that cannot be contaminated by actu-
ally living in it.
Svavar Gestsson refers to these paintings
as European, unlike other art produced on
the prairies. They seem to be messages
from another place, speaking another lan-
guage, telling of other worlds. Still, there’s
something of the prairie in Jonasson’s art.
It is the art of the periphery and of wide-
open spaces. Living on the margins, at a
distance from the major urban centres like
Toronto or New York, grants freedom to
imagine a fresh homeland and to respond
to ancestral scripts in such a way as to
transform and transplant them in a new
Louise with older brother Harold at the bottom of Pine, Boundary park
(Winnipeg Beach), circa August 1957.