1. AMPHIBIGUITIES (solo show)
Center for Contemporary Art
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
2. COUNTERPARTS
Dan Fuller, Christy Johnson, Suzanne Marshall
Wool Warehouse,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
"Christy Johnson's photographic assemblages are aggressive. The pieces are large, confrontational, figural images in a frenetically organized pictorial space combined with sculptural elements that are often architecturally sited. However, unlike the cool detached qualities sometimes associated with the photographic medium, these pieces capitalize on their vigorous physical and material features conveying a strong sense of directness and immediacy. The themes in Johnson's work are as complex and interwoven as are the elements of the process that she uses to produce the work. Drawing on an extensive network of associational visual clues, Johnson places her solitary collaborating subjects in a shallow, multi-layered field populated with collections of objects (animal, vegetable, mineral) and various kinds of patterned materials. She then paints directly on the model, and occasionally the other compositional elements, to effect a disconcerting sense of spatial ambiguity and the general 'disappearance' of the figure. In a sense, she paints the figure out. Long before the current series of works, her entire procedure, including the subsequent photographic 'leveling' of the image, served Johnson as an analogue for the profound depersonalizing process at work in contemporary western culture. That all of her imagery is also laden with themes of sexual confrontation, inauthenticity, isolation and obliteration is but further testimony to the fundamental sense of alienation that she sees affecting human relationships.
There are a number of artists in recent years associated with the University of New Mexico who have produced disturbing and unforgettable photographic images; Joel Peter Witkin perhaps the most well known among them. Christy Johnson’s work matches Witkin’s in its power to disturb and call to full force subversive agendas of the human psyche. But where his photographs remained locked within the conventions of their medium, Johnson has flagrantly violated many of the aesthetic precepts of convention. The net affect is that she has produced physical objects charged with the elusive energy that is in itself the subject of her imagery. This represents the very best of what a contra-conventional manipulation of media has to offer for the expression of deeply held humanistic concerns.” Jason Knapp
