Jess Johnson has always relied on change to push her world-bending, multidisciplinary practice forward, preferring not to get too comfortable in one place. Last year she had a lot planned—a multi-venue Australasian tour of her virtual-reality project Terminus with collaborator Simon Ward, a showcase of said project at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, a stand at Art Basel with her Japanese dealer gallery Nanzuka, and a major commission in Norway—but the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. Johnson ended up spending most of the year locked down in Red Hook, a sleepy waterfront neighbourhood in Brooklyn, looking after a colony of feral cats.
With her plans awry and the world in flux, Johnson took refuge in the alternate realm of her drawings, a place where she is in charge. Johnson’s highly detailed drawings are created according to clear rules and compositional devices. Featuring alien runes, messianic figures and tumbling humanoids (often in poses of restraint or discomfort) set amidst increasingly complex patterned environments, the world is assembled according to a tightly controlled internal logic to which only Johnson is privy. From an organic starting point, she uses text and architecture to impose a tight structural framework. These rigid geometries are often punctuated by entanglements of worms. Symbolising the world’s brain or compulsion system, they spill from mouths, wrap around heads and lie twisted in piles on the floor.
“I found it incredibly hard to focus,” Johnson says of her months in lockdown, “but I used my routine of drawing to try and quiet my mind. It was the only thing I had control over. That and the welfare of the street cats I was looking after. Having those things to concentrate on kept me sane last year. There’s only so much anxiety you can manifest about things you have absolutely no control over. But I do have complete control over the world in my drawings, and that’s always been important to the psychology of why I do it.”
Johnson’s drawings are intricate portals into other dimensions. Science fiction is often cited as an influence on the artist, however Johnson sees the term as an convenient catch-all for things not easily verbalised. Her drawings are intentionally ambiguous. Permeated with obscure pop-cultural references and an overarching sense of unease, they reflect the artist’s interest in multidimensional realities. She says her work doesn’t typically respond directly to current events and the outside world. “But my drawings last year were pretty keyed into the social upheavals of 2020. I had the pandemic happening outside my window; there was a political shitstorm hitting the United States—not to mention the Black Lives Matter protests. The noises of ambulance sirens and police helicopters were a constant soundtrack. Just before the election in October I was at peak anxiety about America falling into a fascist hellscape.”
The drawings she made during 2020 featured in the February–March exhibition Pain Canopy Yeast Steak at Ivan Anthony Gallery in Ta ̄maki Makaurau Auckland. The meticulously hand-drawn works on paper, made with pen, marker, acrylic and gouache, are studies of futuristic dystopias that riff on our entrapment by social media algorithms, online radicalisation, misinformation spirals and internet conspiracy theories. When viewed collectively, they seem permeated with allusions to doom and redemption. The show also included a suite of elaborate quilts made in collaboration with her mother, textile artist Cynthia Johnson, and the video Genetekker Archaic (2019), originally commissioned by Christchurch Art Gallery. Genetekker Archaic emulates the aesthetic of old-school, side-scroller video games. The work’s pixel-art aesthetic offers a stripped-back counterpoint to the immersive, 360-degree experience of the virtual-reality worlds currently touring the country as part of Terminus. While Genetekker Archaic currently exists as an animated scene from an imaginary game, the intention is to make a playable version as a continuation of the project.
Another drawing in the exhibition, May We Live Long and Die Out (2020), takes its name from the ideas of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), an environmental movement that encourages people to stop having children, thus phasing out the human race. It is an ideology Johnson feels personally aligned with. “To me this is a beautiful fantasy,” she says, “but humans are never going to go for it! So it also encapsulates both hope and despair. It’s utopic in the truest sense… utopia’s etymology literally means ‘no place’. My perfect, impossible, imaginary world is a utopia of no humans.”
“We are only one of tens of millions of species on earth,” Johnson continues, “but we are the only species that threatens the existence of everything else in that biosphere. Our extinction is already inevitable. Most of us understand deep down that we are moving towards a horribly unpleasant, climate-ravaged world of our own making. Our natures are simply incompatible with living in ecological harmony with the earth. Therefore our voluntary extinction makes sense to me as a more appealing alternative. We could voluntarily stop giving birth and live out our days as peaceable caretakers. Try and leave the earth in a better place as a parting gift.”
Humans might never voluntarily surrender their grip on the world, but the upheavals of the coronavirus pandemic did prompt many to re-examine their ways of life. Through 2020, for Johnson, the world as she knew it continued to fall away. “When the pandemic dragged on and it felt like life was irrevocably changed, I was keenly aware that all the ways I used to make income might not be viable in the future. I didn’t know if my galleries were going to survive. I didn’t know if institutions would ever reopen. Whether art fairs were a thing of the past. So I shifted focus to making more affordably priced merchandise that I could sell directly to people. That’s something that I could control myself—all I needed was Instagram.”
This pivot provided a reprieve and income, but it was not completely new territory for Johnson. She has always operated both within and outside the art world, making work that is accessible to multiple audiences. The references in her drawings to science fiction and popular culture help. Though the sale of Johnson’s drawings, quilts and editioned moving-image works are still handled by her gallerists, her merch includes T-shirts, stickers, posters, skate decks, even curtains. If you have the tech, you can download her virtual reality works for free from her website, and if you fancy a tattoo you can pick one off her flash sheet.
“I’ve always felt the art world was an extremely fickle and unreliable place—not to mention super-exclusionary,” Johnson says. “I’ve sought out opportunities and audiences outside of it. With these things, I don’t have to depend so much on the commercial gallery system or institutional support.”
While Johnson’s work is held in significant institutional collections, including those of the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and has been acquired by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Darren Aronofsky and KAWS, the artist gets the biggest kick when her work is used or transfigured by others. Johnson says she’s seen her work inspiring drag costumes for club kids in Sydney and being used as a model for children’s art classes in small-town Aotearoa. Just as worms traverse and punctuate Johnson’s drawings, her practice feeds into, out of and beyond itself.
Before Covid, the artist had since 2016 been based in New York, but was constantly on the road for residencies—at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in 2016 and the MacDowell colony in upstate New York in 2018, for instance—and made regular trips to Aotearoa. With the onset of the Covid pandemic, however, her yearning for movement was channeled in a single direction: home. “The thought of getting back to New Zealand was the carrot on the stick that got me through last year,” she says. “For all of us overseas in 2020, New Zealand was like this shining beacon of hope.”
Johnson returned in December and since then has been dividing her time between Whanga ̄rei Heads and Auckland, though still thinking wistfully of life overseas. “The longer I’m back the more in sync I feel,” she says. “New York feels more like the fantasy dream place now.
“I like having a home base in New Zealand but am definitely not ready to settle here completely, or relinquish the progress I’ve been making overseas. So many cool opportunities I’ve had over the past few years have come from being physically based in New York. It happens organically, over time. Meeting one person leads to another introduction which leads to another and another, and then Darren Aronofsky is producing your next VR project.”
And where are things leading next? Johnson has residencies in 2021 at Driving Creek Pottery in the Coromandel and Te Whare Hēra at Massey University, Wellington. At the same time, Terminus continues its tour of Aotearoa and Australia with pit stops at Whangārei Art Museum, Hastings City Art Gallery, Otago Museum and Maitland Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales. It’s all a little reminiscent of Scumm Engine (2018), one of the VR works in Terminus. Within it, you are dropped onto a monolithic sphere—it slowly rotates beneath your feet, moving dangerously close to a precipice but never beyond it. As we aspire to a state of normality after our plunge into Covid-reality, the work offers a salient reminder: no matter what happens, the world keeps on turning.
Jess Johnson’s Pain Canopy Yeast Steak was at Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 13 February to 9 March. Terminus, by Jess Johnson and Simon Ward, closed at The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, in March, and heads next to Whangārei Art Museum.
