Dimensional Paintings:

     Expressing chaos and mourning, Elizabeth Johnson’s "Dimensional Paintings" reflect a decade of supporting her ailing mother. While she did not consciously choose to make dementia-related paintings, her close relationship with and care for her mother has gradually infiltrated her practice. Early in her caretaking role, she made “Anti-Story” paintings that sought to empty grouped images of meaning, as a kind of working antidote to her mother’s extreme verbosity and continual need to recant personal history. That reactionary work soothed the effect of excessive narration by imagining private mental space within a matrix of random images.

     As her mother’s failing memory struggles to organize itself around important words as signposts, the content they recall varies from minute to minute and day to day. Likewise, Johnson’s paintings jumble familiar subjects such as flowers, houses, figures, faces, ships, trees, and water, that she recognizes as an approximation of what it must feel like to be both set adrift yet trapped within one’s own mind. The work suggests climate instability and human-caused ecosystem collapse as congruent with her mother’s personal chaos and its effect on the artist, taking a bird's eye view of destruction and confusion to detach from it. Nonetheless, overlapping and interweaving Photoshop-manipulated images that conform to curves, folds, and waves, locate us in the thick of her mother’s and nature's drama. Johnson builds agitated, dreamlike, malleable, dimensional spaces to contemplate the mysteries created through new perspectives of order and ruin.

     As she assembles parts of her paintings by trial and error, the whole grows slowly. The work, like mother’s and daughter's current conversation, diverges from past and current realities but gels around long held associations and shared emotional habits. Appreciating the beautiful qualities of loss seems to compensate for her mother's struggle, and the pain of watching one who used to talk nonstop, hesitate and come up empty. If Johnson feels a conventional story, one having a logical beginning, middle and end, coalesce while painting, she undoes her last move, preferring to highlight surprising combinations of interchangeable subjects. Meadows, ponds, trees, and thickets twist around the picture plane. People and human-made structures and technologies fold into the activity, high and low, upside down and right side up. The imagery appears to be collapsing on itself or pulling apart at the seams. Within Johnson’s paintings lie unique cues, inviting threads waiting to be tugged, a simulation of life unraveling or memory circling back on itself and shot full of holes.


Anti-Story Paintings:

These oil paintings join unrelated subjects in a groundless, airy, imaginary environment. I call this work "anti-story" because it thwarts the urge to make sense of the world through storytelling. I depict parts of photographs as if they occupy space, and distort or wrap images on planes like wallpaper, using digital manipulation as a tool and hand-built paper models. Fragmenting and mixing images separates them temporarily from meaning, diminishing but not erasing its power. I enjoy looking at combinations of images that have no obvious reason for appearing together, those with few preexisting, well-worn associations, and feeling their lack of purpose. Working in a dream-like space challenges the idea of causality and encourages viewers to devise their own stories.