Herbes de l'esprit , de l'Acadie

Herbes de l'esprit , de l'Acadie, oil on panel, 28.5" x 22.75", Steven Rhude

"A still life, really, is a fleet of cargo ships setting out to sea on a canal lined with gabled buildings. It’s ermine-trimmed silk jackets on barrel-chested ambassadors who are leaning, shoulders cocked, on Persian rugs. It’s a cellar of salt from processing plants in Venezuela sat next to lemons from the Mediterranean. It’s the dogged pursuit of empire and commodity, and a total assurance that every ounce of self-made wealth was not merely earned, but ordained."

-  Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, https://canadianart.ca/features/banff-centre-still-alive-residency/

Like the odd Acadia student jogging, or tourists seeking a respite from the sun for a restaurant, most are oblivious to the deportation of the Acadians while they traverse the Dykelands of the great upheaval. I Phone discourse and spandex dominate the image. All that one can encounter besides the interpretive panels, a black cross, and a farm with some cattle, along the terrain of Horton's Landing, is the unacknowledged dykeland weeds blowing in the wind. Some adorn the path border, others are trampled upon, while others deviate and cluster in the grasses. Yet for the imaginative - weeds can re-establish the memory of the state sponsored ethnic cleansing of the Acadians, changing the landscape of memory as one navigates the same land of colonialism under our contemporary feet. We jog, we text, but do we consider the weeds? Was this not what landscape was involuntarily meant to do? That is to provoke us into seeing that which might be suggested by that which we have no control over?

 Some weeds are generally unwanted. They have a propensity to expand into cultivated land and even poison cattle or agitate the immune system of humans. Other weeds are decorative and benign, they go about their cycle with the turning of the days. Hawkweed are tiny suns, visual reminders of how quickly light can turn to seed and usher in darkness. Yet even though they do link us to the sky, they are rooted to the earth.

 However, the Hawkweed can compel one to briefly gaze up at the sky with the impression that it is once and for all a firmament of the universal, something beyond the religious belief establishment that reeked more havoc than the small pox endemic gifted by the Europeans on the colonized world of the native population.

 But look closer and the Hawkweed might mirror skies that have also been at the heart of the enlightenment; an inducement for the reason of  the mind at the expense of the senses; eventually, and visually, colonizing the sky via a collective expression manifesting with the likes the American Hudson River school of painters. Today they adorn our screen savers - but America is now as we know, the colonizer. Today, whole schools of neo Hudson River painters pepper the American art world of the nostalgic - believing the sky still to be a form of visual universality. 

Furthermore, skies that have acted as a stage for angels and propaganda like the Christ images of the renaissance - reinforcing the power of God as the church expanded its domain - upward and outward, still strike a questionable chord as visitors ponder Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling god moving and creating the universe described in the bible, yet overtly linked to Greco Roman imagery. How different is Rembrandt's Christ compared with Michelangelo's Christ of Judgement. The former a weed, the latter a Hybrid for religious propaganda.

 But today this objective of universality in the sky is untrue. No one sees the sky as an unadulterated option. All skies are not created equal. Any child taking an airplane trip can deduce this. Our skies are now divided space, home to no fly zones and, in some cases, like in New York, the sky, and air space is a known commodity. The increasing cost of air to be purchased as we climb closer to the sun.  So much for the universality of the sky. 

Which brings me back to weeds. Their beauty may not be overt, or immediately recognizable. Nations don't build their wealth on them - on the contrary, they're considered invasive. Suburbanites ensues war on them with a similar zeal like the British Empire used to eradicate the Acadians from their land. Yet, for weeds, their endurance and established presence is generally beyond speculation. Weeds are not normally associated with liquid assets or investments. Unlike the Dutch relationship with the tulip, one does not consider a cozy relationship with ragweed. Yet, to bring them back home to paint is revelatory, to consider them in light of what lies in the soil, not what consumes the sky might lead one to consider why in neo colonial times, weeds have no over arching view on the matter. Like the Acadians, they just exist with spirit, that is until they get in someones way. 



Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS
http://www.stevenrhudefineart.com/