 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
| |
Sue Johnson
Since 1995, my work has been deployed under a conceptual umbrella of sorts called The Alternate Encyclopedia. The project presents itself as a here-to-fore unpublished encyclopedia without end or exact dimensions, and proposes a parallel universe of stories. Works create fictitious publications and artifacts, and the overall amalgam creates a wunderkammer to be constructed and held in the mind, a new kind of cabinet of curiosities. Individual series of works explore contemporary themes such as genetic engineering and environmental crises, consumer culture in history, the role of women in scientific pursuits, and throughout underscores the artist’s role in picturing new knowledge. Drawing on both high and low sources from the documentation of scientific expeditions to ephemera like popular magazines and even supermarket circulars, and from Dutch and Spanish still-life paintings to Surrealist programmes, all of the work is based on authentic source materials. While on the surface the project appears to represent and document all manner of things in a descriptive language that signals scientific accuracy, the sum of its parts is more elusive than a simple inventory of things.
There is something cinematic in recent works, a kind of warped, sequential space inspired by the panorama that was popular in the late nineteenth century. These works are also in the tradition of artist sketchbooks, and I have been specifically re-imagining my work to be in dialogue with Hokusai’s remarkable collection of drawings of landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and even the supernatural, known as the Hokusai Manga. For me, triggered by a juxtaposition of the impossible and populated by the recognizable, each work aims to provoke a sense of the curious and uncanny. New species, abandoned or outmoded products - and the advertising designed to market them, an array of material culture remnants become animated in the landscape. Like a fantastic menagerie or bestiary, when seen together the works create a view into a peculiar cabinet of curiosities, a special collection of natural and artificial things in which the traditionally separate worlds of the animate and inanimate are now conflated, compressed and fashioned into one new whole of cultured nature.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
