brooklynn johnson’s dreamy reality
If you could design a dream, how would you do it? What would it look like? Brooklynn Johnson’s paintings, sculptures, and performances begin to answer that question in a fantastical way. Informed by contemporary feminist ideals, classic mythological stories, memories, and disparate sensory experiences, Johnson creates a stage in which she and the viewer may partake in what begins to feel like a waking dream. We are immersed in her world, our reality is now hers to shape. She plays between two and three dimensions - a painting becomes a backdrop becomes a scene becomes a painting again; a sculpture is an abstracted form is a plant is an abstract design embedded into the painting behind it. Our perspective is shifted with every step.
Abstraction exercises a major role in her work, as does color, with deep blues and golds particularly evident. Form, texture, and sheen are all considered with equal measure. In a dream, the ridiculous becomes plausible and the normal is absurd. What seems logical is nonsensical upon waking. In experiencing Johnson’s work, the viewer begins to feel this back and forth pull. Rather than creating a sense of unease though, we begin to feel a liberating sense that anything is possible. Utilizing wood, paint, carpet, styrofoam, plaster, cellophane, and other industrial and household products, Johnson imaginatively creates scenes that make the impossible seem probable. In one performance piece, for example, Johnson recreates the moment when Eve imparts knowledge on the human race, not as a regretful act against God, but as an empowering, beneficial step towards human independence. Immediately upon eating the fruit, Eve takes on the mantle of Mother and Grower, planting the remaining seed for us, her future. In her performance, the Tree of Knowledge becomes a skeletal ribcage from which the fruit is drawn, and so, the act of eating the fruit imparts knowledge as well as love - the brain and the heart as one.
Much of her art is indeed visceral - glistening and weighty, we can feel the body morphing in her work. In another piece, she is birthed from a shiny placenta, complete with an umbilical cord. She is born anew, fresh and pure - a new take on Christian rebirth. The pink, fleshy hues are saccharine, yet the feeling is anything but sentimental or syrupy. Johnson is announcing her own birth to us, as an artist, as an independent woman, as someone who is deciding their own fate. We are witnesses to new life, and all of the hope and promise it brings.
Johnson has answered the question of designing a dreamscape by crafting a new reality. She is the Creator, and the world she makes for us is at once Eden and Wonderland, dreamy and substantial. We walked through the looking glass, but we ended up in her Neverland. The clay from which she amalgamates her world is made from the reality that we leave behind, but we are so taken up that we don’t even notice. She offers us a new world, unshaped by dogma and patriarchy, and it’s a world worth not waking up from.
To see her work, visit her on Instagram: @bwooklynn
