Oh, Phoebe, talk to me some more, you don't have to go.....
So many years and moments of my life were lived to the sound of your soaring voice. I made this image in memory of you last night, while listening to The Poetry Man. You will be missed.
© 2011 Iskra Johnson
Pastel and photographic collage transfer print on Arches 88.
Today I am holding a New York Times in my hands. My fingers have a faint imprint of ink on them; I can smell the pulp, slightly dampened by rain even through the blue plastic sleeve that encased it this morning. I read the text, but mostly I look at the pictures. I relish the signs of reproduction: the irregular halo around a dancer's silhouette, the soft blur on a soldier's boot, granulated dots across the Japanese grandmother who cradles a child, her expression unreadable behind a white dust mask.
Every few weeks I sort the collected papers and cut out images. Some I put in folders which I label and promptly miss-file: "hands," "people with hats," "bank criminals and football coaches," "people shouting." Where do you file "tribal man holding a translucent scarf against his body"? Or "boy sweeping the sky?" Some clippings I put on my bulletin board until they become so yellow I have to hide them. One particular photograph teeters on the edge of archival viability now; I never get tired of (or less disturbed by) the man in a turban praying in a bombed out mosque. The walls are the palest aureolin and blue, and the blue of the sky now blends with the walls. He keeps praying; he was praying seven years ago and the bombs keep falling, shifted a few miles to the north.
In contrast to this, this living with fragments of newsprint tucked in drawers and pinned to the wall, there is TV. I walk on the treadmill at the gym and a newscaster pans excitedly to a video from Sendai. The video has been shot by a man in his car as his car is engulfed by the tsunami. Water spatters on the window. The announcer exclaims again and again, "These are stunning images!!" The man in the car is having an experience. We, as we exercise, are having stunning images. The newscaster bounces on his toes, practically panting in anticipation of the next new video. The man in the car is a true "content provider" offering up his suffering, turned into a marvelous adventure. I can see the same thing on my phone if I like, while preparing to drift off to sleep. I can play the tsunami, and then set my alarm.
This is what the human condition, ie. "news" has become. It is everywhere all the time, in our eyes and ears instantly, real time or instant replay, on demand, however we prefer, no matter how close or far from us it is happening. The way I receive the news affects how I absorb it. Although I was riveted for thirty seconds watching CNN how long will I remember the man who's car is going down under the tsunami? When will it begin to blur with that fantastic viral U-tube of the guy in the carwash?
A few days ago I opened the Times to a black and white image of a bowl of ink on a table. Beneath the bowl inkspatters and scribbles mingled, and in my mind I added thumbprints, although the thumbprint is far too precious to toss away on a table, as it was the vote of the Egyptian people. I lost the clipping, and rediscovered it online in color. Now I see that the ink is a brilliant fuschia, and the photograph, by the astonishing Ed Ou gathers a whole new poetry in color. But part of the impact of this picture is that I first saw it in black and white and held it with my own hands, and touched it. It acquired a talismanic quality in memory and as I tried to recover it, and interestingly, no amount of keyword searches unearthed it in my quest; I had to go through the archives of the New York Times online.
I went to a talk by a meditation teacher last week. Serene, unassuming, and smiling like someone who might be selling you yarn at the knitting store, she delivered a powerful talk on holding the suffering of the world. At the end of a lengthy discourse filled with Buddhist terms like sila, punya and mudita she said almost offhandedly, "I hold my laptop, and there they are, the tiny people on the screen, running from the ocean, lying on the battlefield, cowering in front of a tank. Don't you just want to pick them all up in your arms and keep them safe?" Beautifully posing one of the most troubling questions of our day: how do we live with the news, keep some margin of psychic immunity and yet retain enough porosity in our boundaries to feel compassion?
© 2011 Iskra Johnson
I created this collage at the onset of the second Gulf War. I am afraid it can be repurposed indefinitely and will never go out of date. I showed it to some friends and one said, "Oh, the vase is our denial, our domestic delusion that everything is all right if it's all right here." And then someone said, "No, it is the table and the vase that are real. They are our sanity. They hold up the world."
The blue vase, I am sorry to say, broke several years ago.
Fallen Circle © Iskra Johnson
I will be participating this weekend in an art sale to benefit relief efforts in Japan. Artists For Japan has been organized by a number of Seattle artists with connections to Japan. All artwork, paintings, drawings, calligraphy, sumi-e, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture, prints and more has been donated. No commissions are being paid, and all the hard costs for the event have been donated. All proceeds will go to the Red Cross.
The sale is being held at Kobo at Higo, a remarkable and historic gallery space in Seattle's International District. You can read about the history of Higo and why it is such an important part of the community here.
The piece I am donating is from Drawings in Dust II, and is created with powdered pigment and water on paper. You can see more in the series in the post below.
Hope to see you this weekend!
Saturday March 26, 12pm - 8pm
Sunday, March 27, 12pm - 5 pm
KOBO at HIGO
604 South Jackson Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 381-3000
All images above © Iskra Johnson 2011
These drawings were done awhile ago, before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, during a mostly peaceful late winter and early spring. I wanted to explore themes I had worked with in sumi-e many years ago in a new way. The series is a form of homage to my teachers and to the traditions I absorbed as a calligrapher and student of Japanese art. They bear little superficial resemblance to traditional sumi-e, but they use the atmospheric qualities of powdered pigment and charcoal to reinterpret the subtle tonalities of ink on paper. Now, as I have been absorbing the news of the tragedy in Japan they look strangely prescient. You can see additional images in the series in Drawings in Dust II.
This morning I woke up with the sea on my mind. A memorial was held this week for the intrepid sailing couple from Seattle, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle. They were killed by Somali pirates, an unthinkable and yet now-common occurrence in our new/old world in which any nightmarish thing you could dream of is probably happening right now.
I did this image several years ago in commemoration of the Indonesian tsunami. I have always loved the origami paper boat, and I did a series called "Rescue" juxtaposing the fragility of paper with the inexorable power of the sea. "At Sea" emerged with an unexpected martial feeling. The paper boat sits in puzzle piece lock-up with what could be the tail of a military transport plane. The foreground image may be in the act of rescue, or it may be on attack. And that is very much how the world feels to me this morning. The lock-up of war and peace is inextricable, relentless, eternal. We make our fragile boats, place them on the water, and head towards the light at the curve of the horizon, regardless of what happens next.
© Iskra Johnson
Watersoluble printing ink on prepared ground
I was honored recently to have two pieces included in Port Angeles Fine Arts Center's current exhibit, Safe Harbor. The gallery space is exceptional, with large windows opening to a courtyard and rambling sculpture garden, and beautifully designed inside to display artwork to its best advantage. This show is well worth the trip across Puget Sound if you live in Seattle. Jake Seniuk, the center director, is a very talented curator and writer. To see images from the exhibit and read his essay go to the current exhibitions page on the PAC site. The first and fifth images from my series "What Does Heaven Look Like?" were chosen.
From the curator's essay:
In (Iskra) Johnson’s series of mixed-media drawings depicting female suicide bombers, one asks the question in its title, What Does Heaven Look Like? Huddled in her burka that conceals the payload connected by a looping wire to the detonator in her hand, she is silhouetted against a gaseous void, in her mind already in the safe harbor that her religion assures as the outcome of the impending martyrdom that will wipe her from the earth.
By the way, if you find this material difficult, so do I. I spent six months completely focused on this drawing series and at a certain point I had to put it away, let it sit, and draw flowers. At the time I started the drawings, inspired and haunted by a news photo, there had never been a female suicide bomber. Now it is a common fact of life. I had not looked at the last image, Before and After, in a long time, and seeing it with new eyes I think it may in a really disturbing way communicate the universality of the human desire for transcendence. If you look at this image without the backstory and don't know what happened "before" would you know which religious tradition it comes from? The piece is shown without explanation in the exhibit, and it made me wonder about narrative art, what it means for it to be "explained" or to "stand on its own." Does the intention behind the work matter at a certain point, if the work has an entirely different narrative without the thumbtacked news clipping at its side?
© Iskra Johnson 2006
Five days ago a story came out on the companion piece to research on social networks and happiness, what I'll call "The Loneliness Project." I have been following the story, the spin and the reader comments with fascination. The story as originally printed seems to suggest that like an illness loneliness is contagious, and it takes a very short leap to reach the conclusion that one should avoid lonely people to avoid catching it. Many of the reader comments posted online are vitriolic in their insistence that the poster "has never been lonely a day in their life" accompanied by helpful comments that lonely people should stop wallowing and just get over it.
In many of the study summaries a sentence appears at some point with a variation on the theme that "this suggests that human connection is important and so are social networks." And yet the framing of the information (with subheads that resemble warnings for swine flu) shapes the response: shun, blame, and flee. I have not yet dug deeply enough to find responses from the pastoral community. But it does seem if we are statistically an overwhelmingly Christian Nation (83% based on the most recent polls) that someone would speak up for loving kindness. I am waiting for the Compassion Project, and wondering which community is monitoring itself for signs of willingness to talk to outcasts.
I had some trepidation when I started looking for happiness as an intentional daily practice, both in my artwork and the life of my mind. I was raised with a fierce, clear-eyed and self-congratulatory atheism by parents who had no patience with organized religion or its homilies. I was trained early to mistrust happy people, because well, the pessimists are always right, and only fools and Pollyannas smile on a regular basis when we all know theworldisgoingtohellinahandbasket. It seemed quite radical to confront this familial doctrine with its antonym: yes the optimists may be wrong, but they seem to be happy. I'd like some of that.
I did a series of drawings at one point called "Dialogue Between an Optimist and a Pessimist" in which I looked at the compensations of both world views.
It is deeply satisfying to go into the world with the intention to find beauty, to share it and to experience joy. And yet I also find that facing darkness, emptiness, that handbasket multiplying with its sorrows, is just as necessary, and it brings its own happiness. At the risk of being a homilist peddling tired truisms, I don't see how you can have one without the other. And I don't see how you can have a healthy society if you walk around only smiling and keeping your heart tucked in your back pocket for fear of being shunned.
Finally for artists and other purveyors of creatively arranged information there is the question of responsibility, for which I have no answer but only endless questions. You can take any battle scene and film it in lovely sepia tones and play Brahms as a sound track. You can read the news of the daily wars and clip out only the photos of the two Afghan children running in sunlight through the ruined city. I love that photo, so much so that I ordered a large print of it from AP wirephoto. You can hide the other photos in the wastebasket, and you can only watch SnoWhite and The Sound of Music, both favorites of mine. But I am not sure you can ever escape the more complex contagion of the Real. Anybody up for another viewing of Schindler's List?
On November 13, 2005 I opened the newspaper to a striking and disturbing photograph of an Iraqi woman suicide bomber. Her bomb had failed to go off and she was captured unharmed. Her husband succeeded in his mission, blowing up an entire wedding party. I kept this image on my bulletin board and thought about it for two years, wondering what goes on in the mind of someone who thinks they are going to heaven in the moment of immolation. This image sequence imagines this moment, from within and without. You can see the series by clicking on "What Does Heaven Look Like" in the gallery on the left.
This mixed media piece and another of my politically themed pieces can be seen as part of the national ART OF DEMOCRACY network of exhibits. The show, "Up Against the Two Wall", opened with an artist reception October 3rd from 6-9 PM at the Two Wall Gallery on Vashon Island, 17600 Vashon Highway South.
The exhibit included local Northwest and some from as far away as Ohio and Minnesota:
Beverly Naidus, Swaneagle, Norma Fried, Selene Vasquez, Greg Hartman, Bob Tomolillo, Todd Thyberg, Rick Tuel, Patti Bowman, Scott Nichols, Ben Meeker, Den Hanmer, Emily Gunter, Ildiko' Kalapa'cs, Betty Gardner, Neil Brooks, Sarah Dillon, Kristin Morris, Erin Hoffman, Laurel Leuders, Mary Pekarek, Tom Gross Shader, Greg Wessel.
