Artist talk with Kathryn Jill Johnson

Please join us on Wednesday, September 25th at 5:30pm to hear Kathryn Jill Johnson discuss her exhibit “Did Your Mother Work at the Castle?” which is currently on view in the First Floor Main Gallery.  There will be a closing reception on Saturday, September 28th from 5-7pm.

 

About the exhibit:

I use an intuitive approach to my studio practice—I set up a situation for making with drawn images and (often) multiple supports. Through direct drawing, selecting and transferring drawn images, adding color, mark-making, and occasional collaged elements, I put together works that have a sort of fractured narrative, a sense of the absurd, and a dark and playful investigation of thrownness. I am interested in psychoanalytical theory, particularly ideas about the uncanny, the mirror stage, and dreams. I am influenced by German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.

I see us as perpetually in a state of medias res, the middle of the action. It feels like our lives are a story, but the force of the past is hidden, malleable and indistinct. The climax is peripatetic and unclear and, of course, the denouement is necessarily unknowable.

Making helps me think associatively about the way we travel, who shows up, the near misses and the head-on collisions, and the mysterious things that make and unmake us.

My narratives exist at the moment before a divination— the tea leaves have settled, the allomancer has flung the salt, the bones have clattered to the ground. But these signs don’t point to the future; they are at this moment right here: a sort of prophecy of the present.

 

About the artist:

Kathryn Jill Johnson received her BA from the University of South Florida and her MFA from the University of Georgia. She has exhibited widely throughout the US in venues including the Fitton Center for Creative Arts, Firehouse Arts Center, Rosewood Gallery, North Charleston City Gallery, Wiregrass Museum of Art, and the Alexandria Museum of Art. She lives in Huntsville, Alabama, with her wife, two dogs, and over 80 succulents.  She is a professor of drawing and painting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

 

Artist website: kathrynjilljohnson.com

 

To find the the gallery in Lowe Mill A&E, click MORE INFO below (Tickets are NOT required.)