A Ship to Sing a Song to
May 14th - June 18th 2011
Opening the 14th of May 2011, 4 - 9 pm
In this show (“A Ship to Sing a Song to”) I am presenting a range of new works exploring territories of painting that include collage and video. I am interested in the tension between the frozen images of the paintings and my strong desire towards movement. In this group of paintings everything is moving, there is an optical turbulence running through all these paintings, which is amplified by the simplicity of their formal components. Restricting my formal language to straight lines, wobbly lines, and dots. I have attempted to create an alternate world, both strange as well as familiar. This world explores the idea that chaos lies underneath all things. A quality that is further amplified by the physicality of the paintings. They have
been worked over repeatedly, they have been scratched and sanded, re-painted and changed over and over, showing residue of their own individual transformations.
This exploration of movement is strongly played out in the two animated videos Going for a Short Walk and Not Me. The premise of Going for a Short Walk is that one might go for a short walk in ones mind and get lost, and that the experience there would have its own logic as well as a palpable reality.
Not Me is about going through doors, and that one might not be actually going anywhere. It is painted on top of reappropriated images, such as those with the original purpose of selling furniture or household appliances. I have chosen to leave the text remnants, which to me are like a disembodied thought that was contrived by some far away thinker.
Ezra Johnson, 2011
