Above and below: Mario Doucette, “La dispersion des Acadiens (after Henri Beau),” 91 x 152 cm, oil on wood 2015-2016.

In the summer of 2004, I worked in the gift shop at the beautiful Grand-Pré historic site in the Annapolis Valley, where visitors learn about the history of the Acadian people and their expulsion from their homeland at the hands of the British Army. I had been politely let go from my previous job at a café, due, I suspect, to my penchant for listening to music and daydreaming rather than polishing glassware or serving customers. At the Boutique de Grand- Pré, I was free to play what I wanted from the selection of Acadian music for sale. My go-to was Madame Butlerfly, Edith Butler’s little-known foray into New Age music. Sitting nestled amongst Acadian stoneware pottery and hooked rugs, listening to a rendition of Grain de Mil that featured backing vocals sung in what I believe to be Mandarin, I had a clear view of historical murals of Acadians building dykes and tilling the reclaimed soil in bonnets and aprons or breeches and high socks. Artist Mario Doucette has never liked these depictions.

“It always bothered me. I tried to research the clothing of the time, but in my art it never looked right.”

He remembers being introduced to similar images as a teenager. In his earlier series, Histoires and Bagarres, Doucette uses line drawing and a naive painting style as a child’s lens in an attempt to go back to the romanticized, mythologized version of Acadian history he learned as a kid and imagine it differently. In his vibrant, unaffected yet fantastical drawings and paintings from these series, you can sense the teenage urge to embellish the margins of the quaint, folkloric depictions found in interpretive centres and textbooks.

Basing his paintings on extensive research, Doucette promotes aspects of Acadian history that have been obscured in popular portrayals inspired by works like Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, where Acadians are presented as tragic figures and passive victims. “In my paintings I highlight heroes that people should know who we don’t learn about in school. We didn’t know that there was an Acadian resistance, we didn’t know that there were people like [resistance leaders] Father Le-Loutre and Joseph Broussard.”

“We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.” —MARIO DOUCETTE

However, there is a question mark hanging over Doucette’s work. In his paintings, Acadians do not wear the folkloric costumes I remember from the Grand-Pré historic site; instead, they are depicted as translucent figures, or their bodies are scribbled over, or they are naked. More recently, in Harias, they are shown wearing classical robes. These choices underscore a key issue in Doucette’s project: the absence of a historical record that reflects the Acadian perspective.

“It’s a people that existed, but we don’t know a lot of details of how they lived … We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.”

Faced with the impossibility of a truly accurate version of Acadian history, Doucette has accepted that he cannot go around the traditional narrative, but must go through. Rather than feel limited by the lack of alternatives to the historical tradition, he chooses to see the freedom that his playful approach to historical narrative and his outsiders’ perspective afford him. “I have an incredible liberty to play with these ideas and imagine what it was like in Acadia because we really don’t know.”

Mario Doucette, “Boishébert fut blessé à la jambe – colour study,” 30 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

Above and below: Mario Doucette, “Les Acadiens de la Nouvelle-Écosse (régime anglais) – colour study,” 27 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

If Doucette’s work from his first series strongly recalls the aesthetics of outsider art, it is not by accident. Doucette has a strong admiration for self-taught artists like Henry Darger and appreciates the freedom afforded by operating entirely outside the system. The marginal role that Acadians have had in telling their own history makes them outsiders too.

Including anachronisms and mixing his own inventions with historical symbols, Doucette creates parallels between his own fantastical choices and those of historical artists. Symbols like the British lion and Superman, American myth par excellence, confront each other in his art and reveal the absurdity inherent in imposed external narratives. In this historical world of toppled idols, Doucette is free to dress his Acadians how he wants. “I thought if we have no stories of Acadians from their lifetime, then they kind of exist of out of time. So I continued drawing them nude, and now I put them in Roman robes, which ties in with the neoclassical style I’m attempting.”

At first glance, the meticulous neoclassical oil paintings of Harias are a major departure from the playful outsider aesthetic of Doucette’s earlier art, but they can almost be seen as parts of a larger installation. In his exhibitions, he decorates the gallery to recreate a salon or a history museum and viewers enter another world. “The message of propaganda is transmitted in multiple ways, including through the context the work is presented in.” He calls his work propaganda art and it’s clear that this is how he looks at all historical art. Doucette appropriates the trappings of official, noble art, from the robes to the gallery walls, to give weight to his new versions of Acadian history.

“People behave differently in this kind of space. They tend to whisper.” The alternate history first imagined in the naive style of a child’s drawing now comes alive and we are able to step into it. Doucette recognizes that his subject and his audience are very localized—he says that he has Acadian viewers in mind as he creates his work—and yet he hopes everyone who sees his work will appreciate the global appeal. His engagement with historical absence has lead him to engage with universal questions about historiography, the political role of historical art, and what possibilities there are to move beyond received identities and narratives. Like a daydreamer in the midst of a history lesson, Mario Doucette is immersed in tradition, looking for freedom, for his art and for the Acadian identity.

Jerry Ropson, “flagpole (shed),” ink and flashe on paper, 2013.

A maker of stories and collector curious things, Jerry Ropson strings together tiny histories that explore the ties between people, place and identity. Ropson, who grew up in rural Newfoundland and is now based in Sackville, New Brunswick, organizes chance encounters and reanimates the forgotten fragments of our lives, those left behind on dusty sidewalks, by collecting discarded or lost objects. His chronicling of the commonplace through layers of random detail, narrative, drawing, text, sculpture and performance can send one into a purposeful tumble of confusion. But in those in-between moments of creation one can feel in Ropson’s work also lies a newly found admiration for the common and everyday.

KAYLEE MADDISON: What is it about the ties between narrative, myth, people and place that fascinate you?

JERRY ROPSON: I am continually heartened by how a good story is never told the same way twice. I like how setting and audience can change the way a story is told. I like how common myths tend to shape a place and the people that can form that place. For me this is tied to my rural origin, but of course it’s not necessarily exclusive to that place. It is common to all myths, people, and places. I am intrigued by how culture can be performed, and how the perpetuation of certain myths are what make a community what it is. And likewise, how those same particular myths can structure and inform the way we relate to any place we come to inhabit.

Jerry Ropson, “self titled (pain and terror),” ink on paper, 2009.

KM: Are there any myths in particular that you’re interested in re/deconstructing about people and place in Atlantic Canada?

JR: I am perhaps most obviously interested in the stories, myths, and traditions of rural Newfoundland. I am continually amazed at how intricate and disparate these can be from one tiny cove to the next. Specifically I appreciate how language is so specific to these places, and how the interrelations of words and objects might take on different meanings. I like deciphering common and contrasting readings of these. I am interested in oral traditions, myths that are tied to the home, the domestic, or myths that have been somewhat estranged through a gendered history.

I think that stories and myths of the sea, of the fishery and interactions with the harsh environment are pretty commonplace. I am compelled to seek out more clandestine myths, near forgotten traditions or unspoken commonalities. Drawn to things that are at first glance perhaps a little dark, having a hit of the sinister or the ominous, I like myths or stories that are obscure, bleak or even tragic, but also have an element of being completely mundane and unembellished. This is linked to my interest in everyday objects that move beyond myth— common forms that convey meanings that are specific to place. The way that these objects communicate to a collective community; the way that some domestic objects that have been coded with meaning through myth or ritual, is fascinating. I also like strange superstitions.

KM: Your work often seeks to unsettle our notions of value—Can you tell me a little about your process in deciding which miscellaneous objects that you find and collect to include in an exhibition, and which may be taken out of the gallery by viewers?

JR: Relating to my interest in narrative, I am concerned with the ways culture is shaped through being commercialized, commodified and disseminated. I collect simple objects, ephemera and words formed of everyday materials and interactions. Again, through this desire for commonality, I both collect, incorporate, and create objects that might suggest some evidence of process, activity or exchange. In more recent years, this has been demonstrated through artist multiples, zines, posters, postcards, stickers, souvenirs and even performance.

I offer tokens of exchange, or sometimes, just gifts. I am attracted to items that have been lost or intentionally discarded. I attempt to reinvest castoffs or the unwanted with some element of significance or value. I work with forms that might commonly be over looked, but through infusing them with time, material and labour, I make the most common things valuable. Inverse to that, I aim to offer things that have an implied worth—common, accessible and free.

Whenever possible I like to offer items up to the public, for example I’ve implemented exhibitions where all of the drawings are to be taken away without charge; community-based projects where I’ve distributed handmade customized bumper stickers to anybody who wants one; or left stylized necklaces made of bits of beach trash as offerings to tourists looking for that perfect something to memorialize their trip to “the magical island” in the sea they’ve traveled so far to see.

KM: You’ve travelled nationally and internationally, working in both rural and urban settings—How has each influenced your approach to art making?

JR: I guess that’s true. No matter where I go though, I think I’ll always just be a guy from a small town. I tried to elude that for a long time, but I’ve come to embrace it in more recent years. I am still so easily impressed by large cities, and am readily in awe of urban areas. That said, I seek out or perhaps even try to form tiny communities wherever I end up. Again, it’s like a commitment or even a yearning for a rural way of relating to place. That doesn’t necessarily mean the clichés of being overly friendly, or naïve; it’s more about seeking out the familiar within the new or determining some sense of immediacy. This has allowed me to further challenge ideas of value and accessibility; inverting mediums … the idea of currency, or even cultural literacy, is something that I often think about. This particular sense of place that I adhere to has come to direct how I respond to each and every site I find myself in. Especially within galleries or typical exhibition spaces, it’s a part of why I continue to seek out unconventional spaces, chances to operate somewhat on the fringes, or within the unexpected.

Jerry Ropson, “self-titled (hard tickets),” 2013. For Visual Arts News

KM: Your work at times explores the notion of creating a sense of place—What does this mean to you in an age when many are leading transient lifestyles?

JR: A sense of place has more to do with being able to relate or connect to your surroundings in some way, than some notion of “belonging” or being rooted to place. I spend a lot of time thinking about systems of knowledge, ways of knowing, and the potential of exchange and commonality. Everyone comes from somewhere, but for many it’s not as important. I happen to be obsessed with this place where I started, but it doesn’t mean that that’s the deal or what I’m trying to suggest for others. The idea that wherever we go, that wherever we end up can be equally significant and informative is also very interesting. I left home at 17 to go to art school, and I still return to that small town several times a year. I spend most of the last 20 years being pretty transient, constantly looking back, but in recent years, since coming to Sackville, I feel pretty settled. Some of that is certainly circumstance and proximity, but in any case I no longer feel that need to keep moving in such the same way.

I’d like to think that my work offers a chance for pause, that the stories and bits and pieces that I offer may give way for tiny moments of reflection and certainly some sense of some place. Is that a proper answer?

KM: Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration and thought process behind the piece you’ve created for Visual Arts News?

JR: Building off of the idea of treating the magazine as a “site specific” exhibition space of sorts, for Visual Arts News I’ve created two distinct pieces. My intention is that these works be integrated within the magazine as single full pages, with each taking on a different role. I think they fit with the ideas of community, exchange and value that I seek through my work.

This first work is entitled Notes From The Camp, simply made with ink and graphite on paper, is visually similar to other “listing” type works that I’ve made in the past, but was made specifically for Visual Arts News and relates to the theme of “community” and “place.” Its title being an obvious reference, the content relate more to a series of research I’ve been conducting over the last couple of years in rural Newfoundland. It will have multiple readings and references depending upon where you are and where you’re from.

The second work, which also ties in with this theme, is “self-titled” and originally of ink and watercolour on paper. I want this image to disrupt the flow and viewing/reading of the magazine, and is oriented as such. The intention is that the work will act a kind of takeaway or artist multiple, which the reader is encouraged to rip/cut/tear from the magazine and disseminate as they like.

I should add that neither of these works would be possible without the beautifully generous people of Fogo Island, Newfoundland and more specifically those of Barr’d Islands, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. I spent most of last summer with many community members; sitting in their homes, over cups tea- sharing countless stories and near endless slices of homemade pie. Lassy Tarts for life!

*A version of this conversation and work Ropson created for Visual Arts News is featured in print in the Fall 2014 issue.

Food collected at a Parisian Farmers’ market during Katie Belcher’s residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

In our second installment of Current Conditions and Forecasts: Interviews with Atlantic Canadian Artists, Eryn Foster interviews Halifax-based artist Katie Belcher. From conducting research with a charcutier to meeting a composer in Spain who taught her how to translate music into a visual form, Belcher divulges how spending a year in Europe has influenced her approach to art-making.

Eryn Foster: You have recently returned to Halifax after a year of living abroad. Where did you go and what kind of art-related work did you get up to?

Katie Belcher: I spent most of the year in artist residencies across France and Spain, and also traveled to Belfast for my exhibition at Queen Street Studios. With a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, I first spent my first four months in a studio at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I also received funding from Arts Nova Scotia and this allowed me to dedicate the year entirely to my practice. I worked on drawing projects, gathered material for future work, visited collections and locations that inspire my practice and discussed ideas with artists, writers and musicians.

EF: While you were in Paris, were you working on a specific project?

KB: I was working on two large-scale drawings in charcoal, titled, Farm collapsing (Ferme s’écroulant). As I pursued my research in Paris—specifically markets, still life, culinary and historical processes and cultural memory—the drawings I worked on in the studio were very much a continuation of my previous rural-inspired drawings. Although my intended project for Paris had to do withcultural memory in general, my experience living there shifted my research to be more specifically related to culinary history and food culture.

EF: Can you talk a bit more about how your time in Europe influenced or changed your practice?

KB: Before I left Halifax, I was on the verge of a shift in my practice, but with little time to dedicate to the studio, this shift was very subtle and slow. The time to focus on my work in a new environment definitely gave me the chance to do this. I found that problems I had been facing in the studio over a few years, were solved easily, when I had the time to think, and space to make. I continued to seek out the critiques and discussions of peers and colleagues, and the communal artist residencies gave me that. In showing my work to new audiences, I came face to face with something crucial to my practice. My highly physical drawing method is evident in the drawing itself. I received comments in Paris and Belfast that my drawings were energetic and dramatic. In my studio in Paris, and at my exhibition of In time’s furrows (Queen Street Studios, Belfast, Northern Ireland), viewers saw fires and floods and disaster, where I had intended to show a quiet destruction of a farm property. It was an eye opener.

The people I met have definitely impacted my work. In Paris, I met an Australian artist who had a nearly archaeological approach to her work. This strategy helped me tackle a particularly chaotic period in a new project. Also in France, I had the opportunity to work with a charcutier, who provided me with a drawing subject. In Spain I met a composer who pointed me in the direction of graphic scores. These shifts were key in the development of my newest project.

EF: I’d like to hear more about what kind of work you undertook with the charcutier.

KB: I was offered a day’s lesson from Philippe Medal at Aux Délices de Caylus, a charcutier, and caterer. This was just for fun, but I jumped at the chance, given my research into historical and culinary processes. Philippe invited me back to work with him once a week, as much to improve my French as to teach me to make a béchamel and de-bone a duck. When he saw my drawings of feathers fused with other textures, he gave me a pheasant to pluck and prepare. I think it was in part to tease me for my ineptitude with French cooking, but also to give me a physical subject. I documented the process, which I performed in the garden of DRAWinternational.

Since then, the drawings I am doing are based on my awkward, inexpert actions of plucking. This informs the basis of my new project, and serves as the test run for a drawing methodology that stems from performing a historical process.

EF: Why are you interested in performing a historical process? Does it serve a purpose or is it more about performance itself?

KB: I perform these historical processes to learn, to escape the cerebral, to examine my own lack of material knowledge, and to develop a drawing gesture; but this action is a performance itself.

My oeuvre as a whole relies on my depiction of domestic and agricultural practices and spaces, disused objects and animal specimens to engage with the broader concepts of memory and cultural knowledge. As a part of the generation that came of age in this “Knowledge Economy,” I question my own lack of everyday knowledge. Unlike my grandparents and their peers, I have little understanding of basic agricultural, building, culinary, mechanistic and medical processes. My drawing practice stems from the examination of these formerly everyday activities that to me are so unfamiliar.

In response to drawing in gallery spaces and to comments from a number of peers, I’m recognizing that there is a performance inherent in my drawings. Unwilling for the moment to draw publicly, I’ve spent the last few years bumping up against this acknowledgement. I’ve come to understand that the performance is in the enacting of the historical process itself, and so the energetic drawing that comes out of that carries a performative quality. The more I dig into this more phenomenological project, the more questions I have, and I revel in that.

Katie Belcher depicted alongside her wall drawing at Queen Street Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2013.

EF: You mentioned meeting a composer who directed you towards the idea of working with graphic scores. Can you explain what a graphic score is and how it might find its way into your drawing practice?

KB: After plucking the pheasant and developing a number of drawing gestures surrounding that process, I became interested in scoring my drawing, as if it were a historical instruction, or a piece of music. When I discussed this with Veronika Krausas, a composer I met in Spain (at Can Serrat International Art Center), she said, Katie, these exist! The right musician will be able to follow it. It was a turning point in the project. Graphic scores are the representation of music in a visual form, without the use of traditional music notation. I’m currently developing a drawn notation, in effect scoring the process for my own large-scale drawings, and facilitating its interpretation in other art forms.

EF: You have just started working as the Director of the artist-run centre in Halifax, Eyelevel Gallery. How has the transition been from full-time artist to full-time administrator? How do you think this position will affect, influence and direct how you make art for the next few years?

KB: The transition has been a bit wild. I started at Eyelevel the morning after flying in from Europe, and it has been a particularly busy fall getting my feet under me. I know I’ll have limited time for my own practice, but my hope to use that time wisely. After this year, I have so much content to work through, I feel like dedicated bursts in the studio could work well at this stage in my practice. I also have a lot of reading and research to do about one particular part of a new drawing project, so I’m hoping to make good use of time outside of the studio too.

The creativity of this job [at Eyelevel] and the challenge of learning something new keeps me actively engaged in art, but I do often wonder if it would be less draining on my creativity to work in a different field. For the next few years, I am gladly taking on the challenge. One thing I learned during my time in Europe, was that wherever you go, you meet yourself. I faced many of the same challenges in getting studio work going. If being a full-time artist didn’t solve those problems, then maybe full-time work isn’t to blame either! This is just the continuation of these lessons. What gets in my way, and how can I work around it?

Sarah Burwash, Still from Finding Way, residency at Wilderness State Park, 2013. Photo: Carson Davis Brown

LIZZY HILL: What moves you to explore our relationship with nature in an age when many people are probably better acquainted with their computer screens?

SARAH BURWASH: I feel like more now then ever we need to become intimate with nature, to care for it, respect it and learn from it. I want to draw attention to out-of-touch relationships with the nature natural world and how that reflects in our emotional lives. For me nature is a very healing and soulful place and I go to it when I need to gain perspective so it is a natural subject matter for me to use, it provides me a huge visual vocabulary to tell my stories.

LH: You created a series of drawings for Visual Arts News while doing an artist residency in Norway. What was that experience like and how did it influence your practice?

SB: I had a great experience in Norway. The residency was set on a remote farm in Suldal, in the southwestern part of Norway. I was provided with a farm house in the hills to live and work in. The farm has no road leading to it and I had to hike up the mountainside to reach it. It was very remote. I could go days without seeing anyone, just the sheep roaming the hills. There was no internet either, life became very simplified—stoking the fire, hiking the hills and making work. I was joined by Brenna Phillips two weeks into the residency which really enriched the experience. My research and source material for the work I created came from the surroundings and my experience exploring the area rather then the internet, which is an easy default for source material. I have Norwegian heritage so I was really thrilled to connect with that.

Photo of Sarah Burwash: Courtesy of the artist

LH: Has making art always been part of your life? 

Yes it has. I grew up with a very creative mom who had me and my brothers making arts and crafts everyday and from a young age I was set on being an artist when I grew up. I grew up in a small town in BC in the mountains and spent a lot of my youth hiking the hills and at our family cabin where I would sketch and draw. I turned our childhood tree fort into a studio when I was a teenager. 

LH: Your book The Far Woods was recently touring across Canada with Conundrum Press and features striking, dreamlike illustrations inspired by Canadian pioneer women and explorers. What is it about this subject matter that caught your attention?

SB: The roots of my interest in this subject matter goes back to when I was a young teenager. I grew up with two brothers, which I feel has impacted my practice a lot and the role models I turn to. At times I felt excluded because I was the girl, and so from young age I fought to be treated equally, to be included, to not let my gender restrict me. For awhile my approach was to be really masculine (I became a huge tomboy) but I realized after a while that that approach wasn’t right way to go about it, and so I turned to books and stories of women who where subversive to be my role models and empower me.

LH: I loved the ink drawing you created for our Spring 2014 issue, “Mother of Life.” Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired this work?

I did a residency in Paonia, Colorado in 2012 and while there ended up attending a Women’s New Moon Group, a monthly gathering of women who made a ritual that celebrates the moon cycles and women and things like this. They had a binder where they collected things related to the Moon Group and in it I found an image titled ‘Goddess of Life’ and it was the source of inspiration for this drawing, I made my own version of it. For me it is about mother nature, creation, cycles.

LH: In your recent residency with the floating group Cabin-Time you had the opportunity to get lost in Wilderness State Park and as a result created your body of work, Finding Way. What’s your own relationship with nature like? How did you feel once you were lost?

SB: Wilderness State Park offered the opportunity to explore the beyond and to get lost in that exploration. Getting lost is more than a physical circumstance, it is a state of mind, a gateway to discovery. I set out daily in different directions, East, South, West and North, meditating on mantras to invoke the different directional signs and elements, and lost myself in subtle nuances of the natural world with a compass to guide me home. I feel really comfortable in nature, I grew up immersed in it—it’s maybe where I feel most comfortable and most myself and I really love to explore nature independently. I also like to test my navigational skills and resourcefulness in the woods and to challenge myself to trust myself, my knowledge and my instincts. It was when I became lost that I knew I had arrived.

LH: What’s next on the horizon for you? Any exciting new projects or ideas you’d like to let us in on?

I am currently doing a thematic residency at the Banff Centre called “Winterjourney.” I have a solo show at UAS Gallery in Calgary this spring and am exhibiting with AKA artist-run centre in Saskatoon through their billboard project. I will be doing a residency at Point Pleasant Park in the Gatekeepers Lodge this spring and a residency at Struts Gallery this summer.