Multiple lines of artistic research converge in Pitch Assembling, a new series of paintings by New Brunswick-based Jay Isaac (b. 1975), an artist of mixed Canadian and Lebanese descent. Abstract representations of roadways and pathways testify to the artist’s itinerant observation of his rural surroundings, but also betoken a multimodal journey of self-exploration.

The series grows out of research on the Lebanese diaspora in early twentieth-century New Brunswick, which brought to light previously unsuspected parallels between historical narratives of pack peddling—a common employment of early newcomers to the Maritimes—and the artist’s own history of door-to-door sales. Operating at the margins of the formal market economy, itinerant vendors have connected rural consumers to goods and services on an informal basis since antiquity. This long history has been marked by demographic shifts mirroring geopolitical events and migration patterns. Isaac discovered that pack peddlers in early twentieth-century New Brunswick were disproportionately recent immigrants with roots in the Levant region of the Middle East. As Isaac’s research brought him to the realization that he had literally been following in the footsteps of his ancestors, images of roads and paths became “fantasized visual accounts of a peddler’s journey.” The resulting entrepreneurial topographies effect a focused intervention in Canada’s dominant landscape traditions. Neither images of “untouched” wilderness nor idealized depictions of urban space, Isaac shows us the more ambiguous terrain navigated by rural migrants and small-scale entrepreneurs.

Excerpt from the exhibition text by Adam Lauder, 2023

Eat Mushroom 13 and you are in for a treat. Eat Mushroom 8 and you experience hallucinations, but not before a bout of gastro-intestinal upset. Eat Mushroom 5 and, after liver and kidney failure, death is imminent. Those are the human-related risks and rewards of mushroom foraging.

All landscapes have buried within them the interlocking constituents of organisms, chemicals and vibrations that make up the whole. The sharing of resources is integral to this system, and that is where mushrooms come in. They are the visible fruiting body of mycelium and hyphae, the fine underground filaments that share and connect resources between plants, trees and other fungi.

This unseen connecting force in a forest eco-system offers a view of a more integrated, far less competitive (capitalist), model of how a landscape might be viewed.