Michael Jonathon Pittman

Black Island 2020–2021 (on-going series / série en cours)
Mixed media painting on birch panel / Technique picturale mixte sur panneau de bouleau
Site 21 – Union Electric Building, Port Union

Michael Jonathon Pittman’s work investigates the history, physical environment and vernacular culture of Newfoundland and Labrador, a culture where, in his view, there is “an innate acceptance of hardship and isolation in the collective unconscious … that long pre-dates colonial history”. Suffused with that sense, the Black Island works are a personal rumination on isolation and loss. The island was home to generations of the artist’s Indigenous and settler ancestors, before the original population was driven into the Newfoundland interior and until remaining residents were resettled in the 1950s. Tiny remote settlements in the Bay of Exploits were barely reachable by boat even in favourable weather. Both Indigenous people and European settlers daily confronted an enveloping North Atlantic wildness, carving out a meagre existence, enduring unimaginable isolation.

In nearly 20 years of artmaking, Michael Jonathon Pittman has largely avoided the tropes of Newfoundland art on such subjects by developing a distinctive, personal visual language. With nebulous spaces, inked lines, limited colour sparingly deployed, blurred forms and recurrent motifs he evokes hard lives marked by labour and loss. Paintings presented at the Biennale are part of an on-going series, tales not fully told, glimpses of sombre, hidden histories that the artist continues to excavate. 

The artist’s work hung in the partially renovated Union Electric Building, Port Union, its raw state underlining the rough, provisional nature of those ancestral lives. 

PG