B.
Human Beans Rejoice!
Behind the scenes
Fantastic to hear that Jess Johnson has won Australia's 2014 National Works on Paper Prize.
Jess Johnson Boston Visionary Cell 2013. Pen, copic markers, metallic paint on paper. Purchased 2013
Johnson, whose meticulously realised and reverberating imagined universes you may remember from her 2013 Wurm Whorl Narthex exhibition at our Tuam Street space, took out the acquisitive prize with a work titled Mysteria Mystica Maxima, 2014. Far from resting on her laurels, Jess is currently lighting up the MCA façade with a video projection collaboration with Spinifex as part of the Vivid Sydney Festival. We're big fans of her work round here, of course, and were delighted to be able to add the three paintings illustrated here to the Collection following her show.
Jess Johnson Hostile Performance Monitor 2013. Pen, copic markers, metallic paint, on paper. Purchased 2013
Jess Johnson Human Bean Juice 2012. Pen, copic markers, metallic paint, collage on paper. Purchased 2013 Purchased 2013
Related
Exhibition
Jess Johnson: Wurm Whorl Narthex
10 May – 23 June 2013
New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Jess Johnson makes intricate drawings and painted environments that evoke other worlds and parallel realities.
Collection
Jess Johnson Boston Visionary Cell
“I’ve drawn for as long as I remember”, says Jess Johnson, a New Zealand artist now living in New York, whose work blends science fiction, popular culture and technology, creating speculative worlds in architectural settings. “Elements of my drawings now aren’t very different from what I drew as a kid. I always used lots of repetitive pattern and I would just work the page until I’d filled it to the edges. There’s something about the labour involved in drawing that suits my psychology. It means I get to spend long hours in the studio thinking my own thoughts.”“What comes out of my drawings is a result of what I put in. The books that I read. The things that scare me”, she says. “To be able to imagine different possibilities, that’s the first step to being able to change your own reality. To be able to imagine a different one.”
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)