Jay Mark Johnson
dal 9/4/2008 al 23/5/2008
Segnalato da
9/4/2008
Jay Mark Johnson
Aplanat Galerie fur Fotografie, Hamburg
During the 4. Triennale der Photographie in Hamburg the gallery presents new work by the American artist all created in the city. In a process developed by the artist himself, he employs a specially modified camera. While the images retain a spatial dimension in their vertical axis, the horizontal axis is dedicated to a depiction of the passage of time.
During the 4. Triennale der Photographie in Hamburg the aplanat galerie fur fotografie presents new work by the American Artist Jay Mark Johnson. This is already the second exhibition after the worldpremiere "Motion Studies" in January 2007, which was followed by successful exhibitions in Berlin, Cetona (Italy) und Los Angeles. The exhibited works were all created in Hamburg in February 2008.
The hybrid combination of spatial and temporal dimensions creates images that seem both strange and familiar.
They not only pique our curiosity but also question our normal mechanisms of perception. Although Johnson's images allude to art historical precursors - above all the chronophotographic studies of movement of the late 19th century (Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne Jules Marey, Albert Londe et al.), as well as the works of Italian Futurism - he goes beyond these in methodology. In a process developed by the artist himself, he employs a specially modified camera. While the images retain a spatial dimension in their vertical axis, the horizontal axis is dedicated to a depiction of the passage of time. The camera thus produces an image flowing evenly from left to right. Although the picture is created digitally, it is not digitally manipulated. Rather it is a true indexical recording of a concrete movement.
J.M. Johnson was educated at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and has worked as an assistant to Peter Eisenman, as well as for Rem Koolhaas and Aldo Rossi. Works of his are in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Collection Frederick R. Weisman and the Langen Foundation, Hombroich. Johnson's varied and prolific career spans theatre and performance art, photography, live musical performance, and journalism. He co-founded three different alternative television collectives first in Manhattan, and then in Mexico and El Salvador during the eighties at the height of political repression and unrest in those countries. After his return from Latin America he started working in the movie industry as a film director with broad experience in visual effects production, having supervised, directed or otherwise contributed to the computer generated imagery for nearly a dozen major studio films and television series, such as Outbreak, Matrix, Titanic, Tank Girl, Moulin Rouge, White Oleander, and music videos for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others. Jay Mark Johnson left the film business and concentrates on his photographic art. He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
SPACE AND TIMELESSNESS
Jay Mark Johnson's remarkable large-scale photographs and photo-collages are about space and time, and paradoxically (...) about space and timelessness. He takes subjects that have engaged the imagination of artists for centuries (...) and transforms them, employing the technology of the computer age, into visual narratives that astonish the eye. In this newly-minted world, the familiar co-exists fruitfully with the pictorially startling. (...) The technique Johnson uses to produce these images is known as slit-scan photography. In the past it has been employed for scientific experiments, and also to produce optical effects in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. (For two decades, Johnson was a visual effects supervisor in the movie industry.) Slit-scan photography involves prolonged exposures in which a frame of film, or an array of digital sensors, is sensitized—over a period which might amount to several seconds—by a narrow, moving band of light. All of the movement that occurs in front of the lens during this period is synthesized into a single image, so that the resulting photograph incorporates the dimension of time, in effect freezing it. (...) (Christopher Finch, catalogue to the exhibition "Tempo Lineare", Cetona, Italien, 2007)
In line with the 4th Triennale of Photography Hamburg http://www.phototriennale.de
Opening reception: Thursday 10th April 7 pm
aplanat Galerie fur Fotografie
Lippmannstr. 69-71, 22769 Hamburg Germany
Tues-Fri 3:30-7:30 pm, Sat 1 - 5 pm