Jerry Ropson

Preface for a Liturgy (Blood Ledger) 2021
Site-specific installation / Installation in situ
Site 11 – Loyal Orange Lodge #4, Bonavista

Three large work aprons, more than 15 feet high, hang from the ceiling of the Loyal Orange Lodge #4 hall. Built in 1907, it is one of the largest of its kind in North America. It was here in 1912 that Sir William Coaker, leader of the Fishermen’s Protective Union, launched a manifesto known as the “Bonavista Platform” with the slogan of “To each their own.” As a historic space of gendered gathering, organizing and collective political action—now inactive—the lodge has a profound socio-political significance in the history of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). It is a site deeply loaded with symbolic and actual meaning, and a building iconically associated with the Town of Bonavista. For his site-responsive installation Preface for a Liturgy (Blood Ledger), Jerry Ropson floods the large ceremonial chamber on the second floor with disconcertingly loud audio of a disembodied male voice and a vibrating score. From the pulpit, a video is projected onto the white apron. Fragmented and layered, the video has the feel of lost or recovered footage. Potently awkward, it meets this space of unease—of languished male violence and power—unflinchingly. Combining video Ropson shot on the Bonavista Peninsula in 2018 (while in residence at 2 Rooms Contemporary Art Projects), rawer experimental film he shot in the late ’90s, and semi-scripted performance with child friends in the spring of 2021, Preface for a Liturgy (Blood Ledger) weaves concern and prompts for labour with meditations on the clandestine activities, colonial “secrets” and unspoken truths of the space specifically, and our province generally. 

Raised in Pollards Point, a resettled Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) outport community, Ropson is deeply interested in the politics of rural demise, ritual and the occult. One of the most important Newfoundland artists of his generation, Ropson offers a work that is profound in its urgency, a call to labour, an unsettling indictment of ”design”, disturbing blindfolded eyes and willfully deaf ears.

MH