Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Jess Johnson’s Otherworldly Drawings, Installations

Jess Johnson’s drawings and mixed-media works are meticulous in design, yet wild and otherworldly in content. Throughout her work, the New Zealand-born artist implements text to help provide more information and riddles about these strange worlds. Her new show at New York's Jack Hanley Gallery, "Everything not saved will be lost,” collects these works, plus large-scale and absorbing installations.

Jess Johnson’s drawings and mixed-media works are meticulous in design, yet wild and otherworldly in content. Throughout her work, the New Zealand-born artist implements text to help provide more information and riddles about these strange worlds. Her new show at New York’s Jack Hanley Gallery, “Everything not saved will be lost,” collects these works, plus large-scale and absorbing installations.

“Her drawing and installation practice is influenced by the speculative intersections between language, science fiction, culture and technology,” a statement says. “In her drawings she depicts complex worlds that combine densely layered patterns, objects and figures within architectural settings. Johnson’s drawings are often displayed within constructed environments that act as physical portals into her speculative worlds.”



Recent work on paper implements acrylic paint, pen, fibre-tipped markers and gouache. Somehow, these disparate artifacts, creatures, and designs create cohesive peeks into Johnson’s subconscious. Johnson’s show at Jack Hanley runs through Oct. 8 at the gallery. See more of her works below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Artist Sean Landers blends varying styles in his paintings, using both surrealism and references to art history to toy with the viewers’ expectations. The artist uses sculpture, photography, drawing, and other approaches to accomplish this, yet in his paintings, he takes a particularly surreal approach to reveal "the process of artistic creation through humor and confession, gravity and pathos."
As we are living in a digital age, it's safe to say that typewriters are an artifact of the past. But for Rachel Mulder, an artist living in Portland, Oregon, the classic typing machine still proves to be an important creative tool. With a meticulous eye, and even more patience, Mulder uses her typewriter as a way to "draw" from old photographs, keystroke by keystroke. "There is something so special in the error of the human hand," she says, "-that I enjoy while conversely and fretfully attempting to attain perfection."
Manga artist Shintaro Kago subverts the form in his provocative, occasionally grotesque narratives. In one tale, in particular, the typical panels become three-dimension vessels, from which his characters break out and manipulate. “Abstraction” shows off both Kago’s knack for the unsettling and the satirical.
Amsterdam based artist Daan Noppen brings a special dynamism to his pencil drawings of still life and portraits. His works are not only eye-catching for their precise layering of details, but also in their massive size that gives his subjects a more palpable presence. A closer look at each piece reveals mathematical equations in between the pencil lines that relate to our reality. More recent works express the artist's continued fascination with mathematics, geometry, and physics, as his figures appear to be gauged, dissipate, and intermingle in a void of empty vector space.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List