Chewing the Scenery

What images does your mind conjure in response to the phrase “Louisiana art”? Photographs of cranes effortlessly gliding between patches of cypress trunks? Vibrant, impasto acrylic compositions of Southern Gulf food spread across a cheap tablecloth, hands greedily reaching into the scene? Another magnolia watercolor? What about Godzilla doing battle with a gargantuan wolf-human hybrid over the familiar sight of our wetlands? That is precisely the launching point for the fantastical imaginary world of painter Jonathan Mayers, known also by his self-given pseudonym “feral opossum”—“rat de bois farouche” in Louisiana French, a language Mayers holds dear.

“I think I got my start as an artist using what was in my diaper to paint onto the walls in my home. Even then I was going for recycled materials that were organic and biodegradable.”

The painting described, Rougarou contre Gojira, painted in 2011, illustrates the basic premise of Mayers’s work. The rougarou, the ghostly wolf of Acadian folklore, functions as a bogeyman in many Louisiana children’s cautionary tales, while Godzilla (“Gojira” in Japanese) has represented environmental disaster via nuclear fallout from the moment he hit the Japanese big screen in 1954. A closer look at the painting reveals the absence of the rougarou’s feet, buried as they are in dark brown crude oil sludging up from the marsh, an inclusion which immediately positions Mayers’ painting within ethical discussions of the oil industry our state both caters to and survives on, often to the detriment of the land. “Many of [my paintings] revolve around environmental disruption and destruction,” he said. “Humans must destroy something to create something, and if you didn’t do the destroying, someone else did to allow you to begin creating.”

In his own creative process, Mayers has recently begun to subvert his destructive premise by fixing the works within repurposed frames coated in marshland mud. “I take mud samples, dry them, and then use a mortar and pestle to crush [the mud] into a powder … then I use acrylic polymer to model it into the decorative elements of the frames. All the frames are repurposed.” Dale Pierrottie, a sculptor who works in bousillage, a broadly adobe-like material of clay and cured Spanish moss, advised Mayers on this process, but Mayers’ drive towards repurposed materials has been present for years. “I think I got my start as an artist using what was in my diaper to paint onto the walls in my home. Even then I was going for recycled materials that were organic and biodegradable.”

Mayers’ fierce environmental consciousness is coupled with a reclamation of authenticité Louisiane. His artistic practice avoids serene and sumptuous depictions of bayou fauna, food, and wildlife, which curate a particular image of our state for the tourist’s eye, replacing them with tumultuous landscapes of clashing politics and catastrophic allegories. His concern for authenticity is personal too, expressing itself in a linguistic passion that also informs his paintings, all titled in French. “Using language as part of my art is important because my art is also part of my identity. It’s pertinent because language informs the way in which you think about things and the ways in which you identify. When I do French immersion programs and I go to Nova Scotia—even there people identified me as an American—but if they approach me the first identifier I claim tends to be Louisiana Creole, rather than American.”

Many Louisiana natives share his ancestry, but Mayers acts on it politically. Last fall, he and other Creole and Indigenous American artists gathered at the L’eau Est La Vie camp in Rayne, Louisiana, to peacefully protest the building of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline—the last leg of the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline. There, a multitude of languages, united as one voice, washed over the artist and reinforced to him the importance and the beauty of Louisiana’s multifaceted linguistic heritage, “we had all these different languages and came together in a ceremony.” Present at the ceremony was a woman bearing the important Houma title “la Louve Blanche,” or “the White Wolf,” who became a symbolic protagonist for Mayers and the direct influence for one of his most recent paintings, La Louve blanche protégeant Rayne (2018). The painting gives us another clash of titans: to the right a no-eyed celestial wolf in defensive posture, whose bristled white hair sprouts menacing, claw-like tentacles, silently addresses the loud and blustering monstrosity at left, a smoke-spewing, flame-billowing, black cluster of pipelines led by two industrial snake heads, fangs bared; the creatures meet over a field somewhere in Rayne. Embedded into the mud of this piece’s frame are claws of the crawfish, a symbol of the Houma people—in this instance, the claws happen to be blue.

Many take the blue crawfish to be an invented fantasy, a myth of sorts like Rodrigue’s Blue Dog, who evoked the rougarou, though it is very much a real creature living and adapting in its environment, just as other Louisiana wildlife does. In this way, it is similar to the mainstream treatment of Louisiana French and Creole, often thought of by outsiders as existing only in history books, catalogued by preservationists. For Mayers, nothing could be further from the truth. “In my opinion, the majority of preservation work has been done. We have a dictionary of Louisiana French, contributed to by academic linguists and independent speakers. For me, it’s now more about progressing and cultivating the language. It’s time to start thinking and living in terms French rather than just hurrying to preserve it. It isn’t a fossil anymore.” Mayers is but one member of a growing movement of independent French and Creole speakers: the catalogue of his Fall 2018 show at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, titled Mythologies Louisianaises, was trilingual in English, International Louisiana French, and Kouri-Vini or Louisiana Creole.

[Now Read: Where The Wild Things Are, a look back at Caroline Dormon's environmental legacy.]

Mythologies Louisianaises also featured one of Mayers’ largest works to date, Cornes de Brouillasse venant du Lac Peigneur, a painting which reminds us that the destruction of the environment due to mishaps in oil drilling and other subterranean industries is nothing new to our state. In November 1980, a Texaco drilling operation accidentally rammed an underground drillbit into the Diamond Crystal salt mine beneath Lake Peigneur, causing a natural disaster of truly biblical proportions which drained the entire lake into the salt mine, forcing the Delcambre Canal to flow inland for a time. The suction power also dragged over sixty acres of land off of adjacent Jefferson Island and captured eleven barges, nine of which managed to pop out of the water like enormous corks. Mayers’ painting imagines a fantastical future in which the spirit of Lake Peigneur, a crocodile-like mouth of muddied salt sludge, expels the remaining two barges from the mine, flinging them like toys through the air in spectacular fashion, the lake water rippling with tension.

For Mayers, an authentic vision of home demands we turn away from quaint, safe images that ultimately cater to the outsider and turn inward to confront our demons head on. His mythologies, laden with ecological ethics in the form of contemporary Louisiana lore, show that identity, cultural history, and the natural landscape are not merely passive agents that must be protected; they are, themselves, participants in the struggle to preserve and maintain a state in peril.  

jonathanmayers.com

Follow Mayers on Instagram: @feral_opossum

Download the latest version of Mythologies Louisianaises here.

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