Press Release:
Bethany Johnson
We Live on a Planet
June 29 – August 10, 2019
Reception for the Artist Saturday, June 29, 5-7 pm Artist Talk Saturday, June 29, 5 pm
Moody Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new collages by Bethany Johnson. It marks her third solo exhibition with the gallery since 2012. We Live on a Planet is the artist’s visual meditation on our natural world, as well as on our human attempts to capture, understand, and translate geological and weather phenomena. Through the collage of science book illustrations, photographic imagery, printer artifacts, office ephemera, and drawn interventions, Johnson flips, duplicates, and stacks horizon lines to create serene yet disorienting landscapes. Through visual themes of data collection and scientific study, the works represent an exploration of how humans see and manipulate the natural landscape.
Johnson states, “The attraction to this imagery is motivated by a reverence for and awe of the complexity of the natural world, tinged with an inescapable anxiety around environmental degradation and existentially threatening weather patterns and climate change. These preoccupations are glimpsed via the various depictions of and/or illusions to tides, currents, state changes, erasure, and burial. We Live on a Planet is an anxious, doting, necessarily inconclusive meditation on the Earth, on our place on it, and on our collective futures.”
Bethany Johnson was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1985 and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Kalamazoo College, Michigan in 2007 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from The University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Texas at Texas State Galleries, San Marcos; The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; Austin Museum of Art - Laguna Gloria, Austin; The Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University, College Station; UTSA Art Gallery at the University of Texas at San Antonio; Galveston Arts Center, Galveston; and the Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, among other venues. A solo exhibition at the Courtyard Gallery in Austin, Texas is forthcoming in the fall of 2019. Johnson has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; Wild Basin Creative Research Center, Austin, Texas; Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat, Laceyville, Pennsylvania; and Denkmalschmiede Höfgen, Grimma, Germany, and has as a forthcoming residency at the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin, Germany. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.
Bethany Johnson: We Live on a Planet is on view at Moody Gallery Saturday, June 29 through Saturday, August 10, 2019. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, June 29 from 5-7 pm with an artist talk at 5 pm.