Jess Johnson
Jess Johnson’s analogue drawing practice creates new worlds, expanded through her collaboration with Simon Ward in a way that allows the audience visiting privileges but little agency. In these places, our ‘fleshsuits’ are relegated to secondary status. On the cusp of their first AI simulation for the University of Oslo, Johnson describes the impetus of uncertainty to Louise Martin-Chew.
Image credit: Jess Johnson and Simon Ward, XYZZY (video still), 2023, Co-commissioned by Now Or Never Melbourne and Otago Museum; Musicians: Andrew Clarke, Lachlan Anderson, Stef Animal and Luke Rowell; Sound Design: Lachlan Anderson. Courtesy the artist
When you look through Jess Johnson’s Instagram feed, @flesh_dozer, the focus moves from latex figures that echo each other’s movements, cycling endlessly through spirals to form and reform, to an alien-like character called Hagseed (a head that walks with human legs). Also included is a variety of highly patterned ‘worlds’ in which the ‘flesh’ figures are passive, responding only to a larger machine-like environment. These are punctuated by actual cats, which appear as a dose of reality. But mostly Johnson’s worlds are crowded, with machine-like worms in colourful and contrasting patination moving relentlessly. It is as though the ‘fleshsuits’ (humans) are in the apocalypse already, searching for a place to be.
When I zoom into the stark backdrop of Johnson’s Roswell studio in New Mexico, where she is undertaking a year-long residency, its white and empty walls are unexpected. She describes the need for a clean slate in her working environment: “It’s hard to leave finished drawings alone and I get frustrated by mistakes I’ve made that I can’t fix.” It is in this restless imagination, perhaps paralleled by Le Guin’s uncertainty, that we find the drive behind Jess Johnson.
Born in New Zealand in 1979, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Christchurch’s University of Canterbury in 2001. Since then she has worked and undertaken residencies all over the world. Yet her trajectory as an artist is non-linear. She had a long period of “not really being part of the art world, travelling and working as an installer,” including in Australia. She began drawing her sci-fi ... Subscribe to read this article in full
