Joe's Neighbours , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Mendelson Joe

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59 pages

English

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Outsider artist Mendelson Joe is a painter, activist, musician, and renowned self-taughter.' But to the people living in the sparsely populated region west of Algonquin Park, he is also a neighbour. With his latest book, Joe commemorates his neighbours in a series of portraits whose subjects range from Canadian musical icon Hawksley Workman to the man who installed Joe's woodstove. In Joe's Neighbours, we get a glimpse into the lives of people who have strayed from the urban grid, and in Joe, we meet a 'pathological painter' who is engaged with his community.'

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	01 mars 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770908703
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

JOE’S NEIGHBOURS
MENDELSON JOE

ecw press

Dedicated to the memory of Bev Easton

Acknowledgements
As I pen this, I’ve been painting forty years. I’m a self-taughter in all my media. I’m still learning guitar at age seventy. I am indebted to the Canada Council, which helped my survival especially in 1992 when I was awarded a senior grant to paint my lengthy series LIARS. It seems I never run out of liars to depict. I owe thanks to advocates such as Annie Smith, David Smiley, Irwin Karnick, Patricia Dixon, John Oswald, Colin Linden, Ray Danniels, Ben Mink, Moses Znaimer, Bob Wiseman, Josh Latner, Vera Kruzyk, and my longstanding art dealer Karen Robinson. To quote the lyrics of songwriter Paul Anka, I truly “did it my way.”

Preface
The Neighbour We Should All Hope For
In the current geopolitical climate in which we live, “neighbour” has come to mean a plethora of things. Just as revealing as its definitions are the distinctions we make — and the boundaries we draw — in order to demarcate those who are not our neighbours, those we deem un neighbourly in thought, word, and deed. Sometimes we dislike our neighbours, often for petty reasons and small differences. An old habit marked by the bloody stain of history, difference has been used to justify the stealing of land and resources, the repression of women, the obliteration of entire cultures, and acts of atrocity and genocide: practices unneighbourly to say the least. Frequently, we find reasons to fear our neighbours; in the global landscape, fear becomes the mechanism par excellence for governments to make decisions based on deception and disingenuous motivations. On occasion nation-states become neighbourly with one another for the sake of keeping another neighbour under wraps or kicking them out of the geographical supper club altogether.
On a smaller scale, being a “good” neighbour has also meant partaking in certain social obligations to distinguish one as an upstanding and respectable member of a community who maintains the norms and values of the status quo (as though mowing one’s lawn could actually confirm some sort of ethical and moral character about the person who lives next door). In some sense, the face we reveal to our neighbours is the face we show to the world, but that face isn’t necessarily one of compassion, caring, or honesty. The masses have been prone to habitually disregard those members of society whose differences leave them most vulnerable and on the furthest margins of the social fabric that we supposedly share as neighbours and citizens of a planet pillaged by some of the greediest neighbours the earth has ever known.
If there is something I have repeatedly learned in the fifteen years that I have known Mendelson Joe, a bona fide neighbour who helps when help is needed, it is this: Joe always tells the truth. While he is an artist, musician, and activist, I would also include in Joe’s list of credentials that of philosopher. Like Socrates, Joe is prone to asking difficult questions of the society in which we live and advocates the potential of our individual actions to change that society. He tells us things we don’t always want to hear and shows us pictures of the way systems of power, and their implicit corruption, are often governed by white men who, as a general rule, don’t care much for women, children, and non-white men. Whether in a song, a painting, or a letter to the editor, Joe remains committed to telling the truth about the world as he sees it.
Such a commitment to truth is at the root of Joe’s unique style as a completely self-taught artist who, after four decades of painting, continues to hone his craft and document the social, political, and natural landscapes around him. Despite never shying away from the ugliness governing our contemporary moment, Joe’s overwhelming visual output confirms that he also remains a committed philosopher of gratitude, beauty, and hope. To sit for a portrait in Joe’s small cabin is to be hosted by a thoughtful and gracious neighbour who treats his guests with dignity and respect, creating a space where his subject is free to speak their own truths while Joe attentively documents a freckle, a mole, or a wrinkle of the forehead (the small details that make up the truth of the body before him). At a moment in history when crisis, due to various causes and effects, sits on the tongue of a society desperate for answers, solutions, and a future worth being hopeful for, Joe’s vast body of portraiture reminds us that hope is not lost. As his portraits testify, in the midst of our neighbours there are numerous extraordinary individuals who have committed to changing the world in big and small ways.
Although I no longer trek across the same stretches of highway that map the terrain of Joe’s neighbourhood, I would encourage anyone fortunate enough to encounter Joe during one of his early morning walks to take pause in the sublime beauty of the sunrise and say “good day.” He might even find your particular truth so compelling that he asks you to sit for a portrait. The planet, democracy, and society as a whole could only be so lucky to have a neighbour who lives with such kindness, integrity, and conviction as Joe. If another world is possible (and that world is worth fighting for), Mendelson Joe is surely the neighbour we should all hope for to join us in the struggle — if we are deserving, and if we maintain hope.
Jessica Elaine Reilly
Ph.D. Candidate
Centre for the Study of
Theory and Criticism
Western University

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