White Ghost Shed, Digby Neck

                                      White Ghost Shed, Digby Neck, oil on canvas, 40" x 60", Steven Rhude

"In the history of art, white isn't as pure as we think. Over the course of history it's been loaded with ideologies that are divisive and at times even dangerous, so dangerous in fact, that white may just be the darkest colour of them all."

 - James Fox, British Art Historian 

The story goes that Whistler and his painting of Joanna Hiffernan, that young woman in white, standing on a bear rug, changed the course of modern art. After Whistler, white was never the same, and eventually became the cold, unwelcoming, and exclusive colour of the artistic elite. Public galleries today still emit the residue of the white cube that marked twentieth century austerity and minimalism. A cultural despiritualization.

Gazing through the window of a fishing shed, while Sam and I were waiting for a ferry to Briar Island, I didn't get a cluttered image of typical fishing gear in storage that I expected.  What I got instead was a white washed interior articulated by the numerous variations on white, which only an afternoon light could afford. A sanitized interior that evokes the memory of reformation churches that were cleansed of frescoes and colour determined by the higherarcy to be distracting to worship.

This is in a sense the shed of the unforgotten, a cultural iconoclast fishing structure refusing to die. A ghost shed is useless without a witness, a visual reckoning to breathe life, if ever so briefly, back into cultural consciousness.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, Nova Scotia