NO SUCH PLACE
Feb 23 – Apr 23, 2013
William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles CA
“We surround ourselves with machines. They shape our experiences, and with them, our thoughts. We travel in cars, trains and planes, encapsulated in tiny vessels, isolated from the outside world. And the faster we race across the landscape, the more it becomes a blur.”
-- Jay Mark Johnson
William Turner Gallery presents new works by artist Jay Mark Johnson. These monumental color photographs follow the migrations of people and their vehicles across attenuated landscapes and saturated terrains --from the dockyards of Singapore and the rice paddies of Cambodia to the dairy farms of Australia and the populated centers of Rome, Prague, Hamburg, Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
NO SUCH PLACE presents a critical look at our obsession with technology--the bicycles, cars, trucks, trains and buses that we use every day--and how our use of these machines not only dominates the environment, it also fashions the very manner in which we perceive and interact with the world.
Over the last decade, Johnson has rigorously pursued the possibilities of timeline photography. His artwork captures the fluid gestures of Tai Chi and dance, the rush of cars, trains and people, and the infinite cycling of beachfront waves. But within his images the rules for representing reality have shifted. Shadows are crisscrossed, the relative speed of an object determines its size and moving objects appear isolated from their backgrounds. The backgrounds themselves have been decimated. In this manner, the results of Johnson’s process become a metaphor for the process itself.
“A provocative blend of lyricism and scientific scrutiny,” says author and artist Christopher Finch. “Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Johnson’s photography is that it tugs photography away from the gravitational pull of Euclidean documentation--which has dominated the field since its beginnings--and prods it towards new and ambitious aesthetic and intellectual goals.”
Held by prestigious private institutions and public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe, Johnson’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Langen Foundation and Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe.