Kathryn Jill Johnson – “Did Your Mother Work at the Castle?”

This exhibition round includes works provided by Kathryn Jill Johnson which will be on view in the First Floor Main Gallery from July 31 – September 28, 2024.  Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public.  The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you!  The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, September 28 from 5-7 pm.

 

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.

 

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