I have started a new set of prints about urban displacement and place, titled “Dwell.” Here are the first images, as I look at a city in flux through different visual languages.
New Visual Approaches to Architecture and Space: Dwell
Gentrification and Appropriation, the Tagger and the Voyeur: Chinatown in Transition
The walker in the city is an innocent and a dreamer. The walker in the city is a tourist, a voyeur, an appropriator and thief. Always with a camera, alert to the capture. And now run home, to flaunt the souvenirs of beautiful decay.
And if the walker has no home but a shopping cart and a space under the Dearborn exit ramp, the walker in the city is a “vagrant,” a word that seems like it should come from the same root as “vacant” but does not.
This person asleep unconscionably at 1 PM under loud traffic is also a thief, stealing a sense of comfort and safety from the other walker, the one with the cellphone held up looking anxiously sideways and sniffing: homelessness doesn’t smell so good.
The support system for the first walker is an entire technopolis devoted to the instant global image stream and the fine distinctions aficionados can make within the pungent hashtags of #ruinporn, #beautifuldecay, and #grime_nation. The support for the second walker is thin, but offers here and there the generosity of climate, a spare dollar, free food or a freestanding and temporarily private toilet. [Read more…]
Meditation on the Winter Solstice, 2015
Winter Solstice, 2015
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”— Gauguin
There are structures designed to withstand earthquakes and there are structures built to slowly decay. These are scaffolds of membranes that melt under rain and light until the wind can blow through, rocking them lightly back and forth. The seed, meant to escape, might remain for years, seemingly weightless, but weight enough to keep the structure anchored. Time moves around it.
I lived for awhile, many years ago, in a former Catholic monastery. The light that came in through stained glass and wooden shutters filled the rooms with rare colors and a sense that every moment within had been granted or won. In this domain I couldn’t make a cup of tea without a sense of ceremony. In the morning I would choose a cup, pour boiling water through a silver weir and thick black leaves, and settle with my Earl Grey on the back stairs behind the kitchen. There I could sit and watch the world awaken through the steam of bergamot. [Read more…]
Almanac Entry, December 9th
Memory, December 9, 2015
A summer day, July. The air giddy with heat and mote-filled like the river in California. Everything buzzing and humming and hungry.
The birds in their circumference of delight swooped from locust to maple and up to the roof. The clouds, shimmering cellophane white like molten sand showed themselves twice: here, and also there, exactly. Easy to fly into the unreal cloud and be met with blackness, sudden and complete.
The bird lay for a long time, whether sleeping or stunned could not be determined. After due consideration of the forms of interference the gardener let sun and wind and ravens take their path. A few days later she opened the window and the bird was gone.
– The Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, Chapter 3
Artwork: “The Stunned Bird,” © Iskra Johnson, mixed media collage
Iskra with Painters Under Pressure at Seattle Sampling December 4-6
When my print arts salon, Painters Under Pressure, suggested we do the Seattle Sampling December studio tour it was. . . . July. No sweat, plenty of time! Now we are all in that wonderful pre-show manic state of trying to make art round the clock while life in its inconvenient way interferes. Laundry? Bookkeeping? The Gym? Huh. I have never made so much work in such a compressed period of time. I think the happiest state, the state of mind I treasure most, may be just pure focus, and I’m there, even if I am wearing last week’s socks. [Read more…]
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