Mary A. Johnson

Statement / 中文

My studio practice emphasizes the precarious and shifting nature of the stories we tell ourselves. I create work that interrogates how perception narrates our experiences. In spite of our globalized economy and media, we find ourselves increasingly attempting to fill gaps in our disconnections between one another with assumptions created from the feedback loop of perception and experience.

I make two dimensional and relief paper-based work as well as installations and animations. My work regularly amasses multiple layers as a whole, intentionally creating images that confound. It often takes the form of thickly layered paper collages made from my own images, painted and drawn on until they reflect the totalizing and precarious human experience they reflect upon. Distinct polarities become indistinct in my work.

The images used in my paper-based work are taken from tablescapes I build in the studio that situate themselves between still life and landscape. They are often diminutive, recalling the toylike or domestic. Once enlarged or decontextualized through collage the imagery changes the familiar into the unfamiliar. The dioramas I construct are tangibly real- they create odors, draw insects, and slowly melt. Lens-based processes mediate this experience, while cutting and layering does so further.

Men on Mars and The Red Planet utilize images made from a miniature Martian landscape created in my studio from red Texan dirt and lit with rainbow hued LED lights. I cannibalize these images into backdrops, such as in the 2022 BOX13 installation, or archival black and white prints which I further drew and collaged upon in the two-dimensional work in The Red Planet. Rocks and sand scanned, reproduced in the darkroom and enlarged are printed on multiple surfaces and utilized in my current Star Disc drawings (Waterloo Arts 2024) with astrophotography from the Stull Observatory. Images from my Dark Soils installation at SquareSpace (2019, Shanghai), and Tower of Babel (2019, multiple cities, China), are digitally piecemealed into slowly fluttering animations in Heartthrob (2019) and Dark Soils, Animation (2019).

The perceptual disjoints of all of my chosen materials reflect the work’s inquiries into shifts and movement, while becoming more than the sum of their parts. Enveloping totality and mythology play roles in my work that often uses the form of the landscape- whether on the kitchen table or the horizon line - to tell its stories. The re-contextualization of fragments of imagery create a space in which it is very difficult to pin anything down. Perception and experience are questioned through narrative of space and archetype.