Jonathan S. Green
& there’s no more living off the land
november 25 - January 28, 2022
About the exhibition
The Grenfell Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Winnipeg-based Newfoundland artist Jonathan S. Green. Expanding on printmaking as medium and process Green deploys a dazzling array of print techniques to undermine conventional notions of human’s mastery of nature. Green’s work cultivates an uneasy and eerie view of landscape, where our historical colonial past must be reconciled with our contemporary desires to experience and exploit wilderness. Excerpts of text from Green’s own writing, Newfoundland-writer Sarah Tilley’s novel ‘Duke’, and the work of 19th century novelist Jack London, punctuate imagery of man-made shelters and deteriorating deconstructed log cabins, some licked by flame.
At its conceptual and critical foundation Green’s work highlights the hypocrisy of settler notions of land stewardship and care in the age of the Anthropocene. Weaving together several bodies of work and pushing the form of his practice in this exhibition, Green actively effaces colonial narratives of conquering and possessing nature, urging efforts toward living on this planet as light and inherently temporary.
Beyond providing speculative platforms for divining a new relationship to the natural world, Green’s prints carve out a future possible path in which the environment is understood as primary and existence within it is conditionally responsive. A sketchy blueprint that doesn’t ignore history, the failings, and
misapprehensions that have propagated so much destruction, but instead reclaims and recasts what is of use in the past towards greater potential.
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba on Treaty No. 1 territory, the original lands of Anishinaabe, Ininiwak, Anishininiwak, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation Jonathan S. Green is of Mi’kmaq, Inuit and settler heritage, born in Labrador City. He does not know a lot about his indigenous heritage but is trying to learn more. Green earned an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2016, and a BFA from Memorial University of Newfoundland’s School of Fine Arts at Grenfell Campus.
