Kysa Johnson
Black Gold
Crude focuses on the natural history of oil, from its chemical inception in nebulae to its modern extraction from the earth. The works in Crude cycle through five geologic/historical periods.
First, paintings associated with Johnson’s Long Goodbye series use a visual alphabet of particle decay patterns to depict nebulae whose young stars emit ultraviolet light, believed by scientists to generate hydrocarbons, oil’s key ingredient.
Second, Johnson’s lyrical watercolors recast Monet’s Water Lily paintings as depictions of the primordial soup of life. Monet made his late masterpieces during World War I, a conflict often described as the first oil war, and Johnson uses their pictorial structure to explore images of microscopic plankton living in the Mesozoic oceans. Plankton, once fossilized, becomes the basic material transformed into oil through millions of years of heat and pressure.
The chalk-on-blackboard drawings articulate the third act in Johnson’s narrative, the plankton as fossil remains.
Large works made in ink on gloss black constitute the fourth period, again using Monet’s water lily compositions, now as a basis for imagining liquid oil in the earth’s crust. These paintings are more compact and dense than the watercolors and chalk drawings, suggesting the unreleased energy within oil deposits. The gloss black background in these works mirrors oil’s black sheen, just as the black in the Long Goodbye series refers to the emptiness of space.
The final stage, oil extraction, is represented by an installation of sculpted plankton forms intermingled with strings of beads whose shape mimics the phytoplankton Prorocentrum donghaiense. In this installation, the ratio of the mass of the rectangular element on the floor to the mass of the ascending beads is roughly the same as the ratio of ten million years (the minimum time required to create oil) to the few hundred years between the first oil well in 1858 and the fast-approaching date when we will have depleted the earth’s supply.






















Ink on gloss on board
72 x 96 inches

Ink on gloss on board
30 x 20 inches

Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paint on aluminum
48 x 60 inches

Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paint on aluminum
48 x 96 inches

Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paint on aluminum
48 x 96 inches

Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paint on aluminum
48 x 96 inches

Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paint on aluminum
12 x 12 inches

Fixed chalk and Chinese white pencil on blackboard
16 x 20 inches

Fixed chalk and Chinese white pencil on blackboard
30 x 24 inches

Fixed chalk and Chinese white pencil on blackboard
60 x 60 inches

Ink on gloss on board
48 x 60 inches

Ink on gloss on panel
36 x 36 inches

Ink on gloss on panel
60 x 48 inches

Ink on gloss on panel
72 x 96 inches

Ink on gloss on panel
40 x 30 inches

Ink on gloss on panel
36 x 24 inches
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