Just listened to a discussion on the Bad at Sports podcast,
where they were going on about how hard it is for Chelsea artists to change up
what they do because there is an expectation from buyers and gallerists that once
an artist sells, he/she will continue to produce similar sellable objects. Well,
Johnson seems to have had an impressive ten-year run at Julie Saul, where she
has had the freedom or bravery to subvert expectations and work through ideas
in her shows. I, for one, have always fond that exploration enjoyable. Her new
work is in keeping with her ongoing growth as an artist. She is still drawing
on top of pictures, but she is being more aggressive than ever with it and is using
it to take on the ever-tricky subject of people having sex.
As Winogrand said, “it’s hard to make a picture about a
monkey and not have it be about a monkey.” Johnson’s pictures are certainly
about sex, but for the first time that I can remember in photography, she deals
with the subject in a way that is both sexual and relatable. Which might sound
odd in describing pictures which involve a lot of drawing on top of prints, but
somehow a silhouette of people kissing splattered in gold leaf seems about
right for a visual description of the experience, and a body covered in a
colorful installation of dots seems to be a pretty good visual representation
of an orgasm. Johnson has drawn sad and happy clown faces over people’s faces,
portraying sex as both inherently goofy and deviant, a representation that
feels exceedingly accurate and intelligent. There is one misstep in the show, a
picture that has a man’s arms photoshopped (?) around a women like a snake it
is way to sentimental and seems like a dramatic step down from an otherwise
excellent body of work about a challenging subject matter.
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