Tag Archives: Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl

What Was I Thinking?

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I used to hate writing art statements.

“I’m expressing this visually,” I argued with my professors, “Why do I have to write something down?”

I thought that writing my thoughts killed the art. If I expressed the idea in words there was no reason to say it visually.

My residency with the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl ended and I moved “Reframing the Grimm” out of the Annex in March 2024. Since then I’ve been pitching this artwork to granting organizations, galleries, shows, even a convention, and I’m writing a lot of art statements. It’s a job that I now enjoy —not that I’m good at it, but because it challenges me. I write and rewrite art statements for each application, sometimes to fit the new context, sometimes because this artwork keeps changing.

When I write these statements I’m asking myself: What am I saying? What was important enough to make me want to say this? And, what makes this a “Jennifer Morgan” piece of art?

Robert Chafe says that when a story makes him cry, he knows he will write a play about it. Mary Pratt said she “felt a zing” almost sexual, when she saw the light hit an object. In my case, I feel a longing when I see a photograph, or a collection of houses, or a cove placed in a bay, like it was painted inside a teacup. But that feeling doesn’t make an art statement. What are the things I’m attracted to? What are the ideas I end up returning to in woodblock, etching, or in paint?

I create art to understand things around me. Drawings are often called studies. Like other things I have studied, I feel a special affinity for people, places, and objects that I have drawn. I know them (as Mary Pratt might say) in the Biblical sense.

Two years into this project, in the midst of a painful relationship crises, I realized what this piece of art was saying. It was about patterns of behavior that I saw myself repeating, patterns that I thought were protecting me, but which were really hurting me. Once upon a time, I thought this artwork was about the Grimm’s fairy tale “The Juniper Tree”, but that story is completely immaterial to the real theme of this work of art. It only gets credit for getting me to the final goal.

This past March, when people showed up at the Mount Pearl Annex and embodied this labyrinth of bad relationships, I saw the meaning of my immersive book change–again. In the heart of the labyrinth each reader enters a triangle, made up of the back of the printed story, with signposts that read: You Belong; Yes, I Can; and You Are Enough. Here, I reversed the stereotypical roles with “Coach” in gold letters above an upside down “Hero”. Likewise, “Victim” was supplanted by a gold “Risk-taker” and “Challenger” (also in gold) overturns “Bully”. These stereotypes form the three corners of a diagram created by the psychiatrist Stephen B. Karpman, which he called the Karpman Drama Triangle.

Then there are the three meditations hanging in each corner. One is a quote from the Gnostic gospel “Voice of Thunder” the other two are written by me, but inspired by the Gnostics. A Christian sect, influenced by nature mystery religions, the Gnostics believed that wisdom was found in the clash of opposing thoughts. Rather than “either/or” they believed in “both/and”. And, that brings us to the centre, the core of my immersive book. Here in the centre is engraved a little boy in a fetal position, playing a video game on his phone. He is engraved in a tree slice which rests on a pile of books.

This is not a piece with a lot of answers. But there is one thing that I know is true: the most important thing must be the child, everything else is negotiable. The three egos in the three corners of every story we’ve ever triangulated are interchangeable. They are figments of our imagination—which is not to say they are not powerful. That was my meaning of the piece. But every reader came away with a different message. I know because I asked them, and then, the asking became the theme of this work.

In March, I sat in the lobby of the Annex, and listened to people answering my five feedback questions. The last one was, “What did you feel in the centre of the triangle?” Some people felt claustrophobic, some felt peaceful, one felt sad, one felt awed. Four people had gotten lost in the maze and I interrupted our interview to show them where the middle of the triangle was. After that I hung a sign which said “Exit this way”.

            “But there was no exit!” two readers complained.

            “So how did you exit the triangle?” I asked them.

            Some people ducked under the pattern paper, some people retraced their steps. Nobody took down the walls, which I did with the help of the Nia dancers, radically restructuring the story. I’m both relieved and disappointed that no one took my artwork apart.

            The point is, the story was just a vehicle. The message of the artwork was in the conversations I had with everyone who came to see my art.

            Here’s my new Art Statement: ‘Reframing the Grimm’ is a way for me to get to know my readers better. They are the subject of this work of art.

Now, when I’m out and about in St. John’s, and I see my readers, I feel the same affinity for them that I feel for subjects I have drawn. They honored my artwork with their attention and, in return, allowed me to see them and hear them.

–May 2024

Joey Smallwood and the Day Words Lost Their Weight

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His official name was Joseph R. Smallwood, but his boyhood friend and my grandfather, Mac Morgan, called him Joey. By the time Newfoundland joined Canada, almost forty years later, everyone in the country also called him Joey.

Mac and Joey met in the busy business district of St. John’s, the capital of the Dominion of Newfoundland. They were both the same age as the year, so this would have been around 1912 and they sold newspapers outside the tobacconist on Duckworth Street to lawyers running to Court and businessmen buying pipe tobacco.

Joey, a boarding student at Bishop Feild, picked up his papers after school from either The Evening Telegram or The Daily News, or one of the weekly papers. Today, St. John’s has only one newspaper, The Telegram, a thin publication that is printed six days a week. In my grandfather’s adolescence the town had at least two dailies, and several weeklies, often five or six newspapers, each representing different sides of vigorous debates on a wide range of civic issues.

While Joey came from rural Newfoundland, Mac was a townie who, after attending the small Seventh-day Adventist school run by Miss. Pippy, took his grade eleven at Prince of Wales Collegiate – the preferred alma mater for Protestant merchant class scions. It was unusual for sons of tradesmen to finish high school, Mac’s friend never did, instead Joey parlayed his contacts as a newspaper boy and, I suspect, typesetting skills learned in the basement of Mac’s family’s house, into a job as a Printer’s Devil for the Plaindealer.

A Printer’s Devil is what they called apprentices who cleaned the shop, melted yesterday’s articles into lead slugs for tomorrow’s linotype, and sorted headliner type back into a job case. By 1919 Joey had worked his way up to being a cub reporter at the Evening Telegram accompanying Billie Murphy to Trepassey to cover the first successful (but not unbroken) crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by the Americans. He even had his own byline on an article about the Naval Wireless Transmission Station in Mount Pearl, currently home to the Admiralty House Communications Museum, next door to the Annex where I’m doing my art residency this winter. Joey used his Evening Telegram portfolio to get reporting jobs when he moved to New York the next year.

Family lore says that when he first arrived in the Big Apple, Joey slept on the couch of his friend Billie Newhook, who was courting Mac’s sister, Cynthia Morgan. Cynth married Bill in 1922, which may have forced Joey to find a place of his own. At the time he was a freelance journalist for at least three New York newspapers.

In the post-war era most New York working class intellectuals were socialists. In 1924, Joey worked on the Socialist Party of America’s presidential campaign, while writing for the socialist paper The New York Call. When he returned to Newfoundland, Smallwood imitated his hero, Sir. William Coaker, becoming a union organizer and founding two newspapers: the Labour Outlook, and then the Humber Herald. He was living in Corner Brook at that time with his new wife, Clara. He also joined the Liberal Party (again, like his hero Coaker) working as campaign manager for Sir. Richard Squires in the Humber valley, and running, unsuccessfully, for Bonavista a few years later.

I don’t know if it was politics, or geography, or just the busy life of a job printer with a growing family, but Mac lost touch with Joey. Then, everyone in St. John’s was reading a column in the Daily News called the Barrelman.

The Barrelman is the sailor stationed in the crow’s nest. He is the first to sight land, or danger, and to communicate that to the crew. In his column, Joey Smallwood took advantage of his personal knowledge of the island to promote (he would say create) Newfoundland nationalism.

When the Barrelman appeared on radio VONF (the Voice of Newfoundland) in 1937, Joey’s fifteen-minutes of patriotic anecdotes and cultural gems became required listening across the Dominion. But the Depression was in full force in Newfoundland and, needing to support his family, Joey returned to his birthplace in central Newfoundland to run a pig farm.

But Newfoundland didn’t forget Joey and, when he left the farm to enter the confederation debate, Joey remembered the power of radio. As the Barrelman, he had developed a relationship with his listeners by reading their letters on the radio. He had his generation’s trained memory, and never forgot the name of anyone he met. He had the gift of persuasion, the ability to read the room, and he told stories that pulled on people’s heartstrings. His speeches were not wordy treatises, written to be read, but filled with repetition and short sound bites. Joey Smallwood wrote for radio.

But it is interesting that in this, the fight that history remembers him for, Joey also created his last newspaper: The Confederate. Why would he do that? Maybe it was because radio was ephemeral. In that era words on paper built credibility and legacy — especially if you controlled the medium. Or maybe it was that newspapers were something that Joey understood from a lowly Printer’s Devil up to being a newspaper publisher. And yet…Joey had witnessed radio’s power during the Depression, when populist politicians used radio to win elections in the United States and Europe. In World War II, like everyone else, Joey heard Winston Churchill use radio to rally the Western democracies against Nazism.

I suspect that the St. John’s Protestant merchant class never tuned into VONF, or attended rallies in the small towns where fans showed up to meet the Barrelman. The final vote was 51 to 49 in favour of confederation. Some say the referendum was rigged. But, even if that is true, rural Newfoundland and working-class St. John’s and Corner Brook, showed up in strength to vote for Joey.

The photograph above, also on display at Admiralty House Museum, shows Joey Smallwood signing the agreement that made Newfoundland a province of Canada. The museum caption says that Joey barred all members of the press – with the exception of radio – to the event. What the newspapermen didn’t hear, when the sound of Joey’s signature was broadcast across the country, was the cry from the Barrelman signalling the death of print media, and the arrival of radio. The day was March 31, 1949.

–Jennifer Morgan, February 5, 2024