The exhibition Ghosts In Common, Johnson’s second with the gallery, continues her decades-long use of macroscopic and microscopic scientific imagery to explore how we relate to the universe we inhabit. Using an alphabet of particle decay patterns (the infinitesimal pathways that subatomic particles travel along as unstable particles decay into more stable ones) to build up the larger compositions, she explores a recurring theme in her work, the steady cycles of transformation and collapse at all scales and similarities that connect them. Ghosts In Common engages with these ideas through the lens of commonalities between the 14th century and today.

Both eras of political upheaval, social collapse, transformation, and plague (especially in Europe and Asia), humans today are experiencing many of the things those 700 some odd years ago were. At the same time, they are interacting with many shared common objects and environs that have transformed little over the centuries. They ate from bowls, burned their rubbish, grew gardens filled with herbs, roses and mint, hoping to survive and thrive as we do. Quarantines, rogue militias, and the perils of a top heavy society surrounded people then as they do us now.

Recent series have used particle decay patterns as a visual alphabet to explore the life and death of stars (The Long Goodbye), the origins and cultural valence of gold (As Above, So Below), and the creation of the hydrocarbon in nebula (CRUDE). All using the microscopic, telescopic, and historic to illuminate our present. Whereas series like The Long Goodbye uses these marks of dissolution and transformation to mine those processes at the cosmic scale, Ghosts In Common uses imagery firmly planted on earth from two time periods interchangeably to explore echoes of shared human experience across the ages. This work focuses on the small similar things that we see every day to meditate on connections through time and history.

A series within the series uses imagery from Johnson’s backyard herb garden and drawings and paintings of domestic gardens from the 14th century. Even though grown centuries apart, all are filled with similar plants – wild roses, mint, rosemary, and thyme among others. These are the same herbs and flowers that plague doctors would stuff in their beak-like masks, or people would carry in kerchiefs to hold in front of their noses before venturing out into the streets during their plague.

Many of the works in “Ghosts In Common” are rendered on linen, a new surface for the artist. Whereas the glossy black references the vast universe and stars that are the birthplace of all things, and the chalkboard refers to the scientific sources of the work, the linen is solidly of this earth, of the human scale and experience.

By focusing her eye to different moments in time whether they are centuries or millions of lightyears away, Johnson is always trying to understand what is it to be human in the universe? What is it to be human in history? What are the unifiers? What is shared by the bowl that holds our broth and the nebula that spawns the elements that make it, and us? What are our ghosts in common?”

Written by Kysa Johnson