Iskra Fine Art

The Water Tower Project from Iskra Fine Art

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All that is Solid print by Iskra
“All That is Solid….” limited edition archival pigment print ©Iskra Johnson

The Water Tower Project

It might have been enough to face off with a pandemic. But the center does not hold, “all that is solid melts into air,” and across the world cities are aflame with protest and an expanding movement for social justice. As structures of order crumble, as statues are de-platformed and sprayed with graffiti, as the jails and hospitals overflow, we huddle in isolation, transfixed by news that is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. Can you blame a person for looking for something to hang onto?

In the chaotic urban environment, the water tower shines for me as a beacon. I think of it as the German Shepherd of architectural structures: noble, tastefully proportioned and faithful to its purpose, which is to gather the heavens in a bucket and gift it back to us glass by glass. It sits high atop the city, merged at times with the clouds, and calling down from the heavens a very practical benediction. It is a usually hand crafted vessel, built from wood, using a method little changed from the 1800’s. Water towers are rarely defaced by graffiti, but any totem of neutrality invites our projections.

The Water Tower Project looks at this iconic structure from many different perspectives. In some cases I have located the tower in an imaginary landscape, complete with horizon line. At other times it serves as an emotional vessel to express the clamor and heartbreak of the streets. I am offering this series through the #ArtistSupportPledge, which is a global initiative to broaden the circle of art appreciators and create a circle of generosity. The first two prints in each edition of 35 are priced at $150, half the usual price of $300. When I have earned $1,000 from the sales I will then purchase the work of another artist for up to $200. At the end of this post you will find the collection of 16 gathered as a jpg that may be downloaded for reference. In the week since I have been posting these to social media I have sold three, so if you are interested in the PandemicPrice you may want to move quickly. The blog software allows me to show images at their best quality, so I will post the entire set here (click below the fold) for the time being rather than my portfolio. I am offering these through direct sales rather than through my shop, so please reach me through email if you are interested.

Each Water Tower has a story, and if you are interested in the narratives I suggest following along on Instagram.

Angle of Repose Water Tower by Iskra
“Angle of Repose,” limited edition archival pigment print ©Iskra Johnson

 

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The Pandemic Pause Drawings, A Benefit Sale for Fair Fight

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Origami crane pencil drawing by Iskra
Origami Peace, ©Iskra Johnson, graphite pencil drawing on paper, $350 (SOLD)
Pandemic Pause | New Directions

Since the pandemic lockdown began two months ago I have been working on a series of drawings. The original impetus came from my ongoing project, #100DaysOfTheSpaceBetween, introduced last month. Although the project also involves photography and other media, I decided to use drawing as the foundational practice. In this strange time, cut off from family, friends or social contact, I have sometimes floundered. The isolation of confinement has thrown me into emotional states surreal in their intensity, and the quiet absorption and focus of drawing has become a calm oasis in my days.

As the solitudes of the pandemic have segued with shocking speed into the pandemonium of a June aflame with flash grenades and tear gas I have questioned, as many artists have, the relevance of their art in this time. Social media demands a simple story, an allegiance to one side, and the embrace of slogans with no nuance. I reel in horror at the videos of George Floyd’s murder and wonder if I should drape a black tarp over my Instagram account? For how long? Do I stand with the rioters? The protesters? The police? Or is it possible to stand in a place where I can see from all points of view? Who gets to decide?

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Iskra Fine Art #100DayProject and the Garden Show at Museo

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The Space Between Train Collage

(See the Motion version on Instagram.)

It has been only 20 days since I last wrote here, and yet in that time the world is completely changed. Millions of people across the globe are now confined to their homes as modern life as we have known it shuts down in the face of the corona virus. The profound sense of isolation in the studio, combined with the media’s constant drumbeat of dystopia pushed me for several weeks close to despair. Forced to look at the books on my shelves (and consider reading them) I came across Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In it, the draft of a calligraphic treatment of a quote: A single metaphor can give birth to love.

With galleries closed and shows delayed or cancelled, and with a sense of life or death urgency and helplessness heavy in the air, motivation for working in the studio has been in question. But the quote, and its tissue paper flourishes, lingered in my mind. I think it was its echo that led me to realize that this is the time, after years of thinking about it, to take on #The100DayProject. Under house arrest in my pajamas, there is no escape. And certainly nothing to lose.

The One Hundred Day Project was first introduced in 2007 by designer Michael Bierut as a challenge to his graduate students at Yale. The outlines were simple: “Do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day for one hundred days.” The project was brought onto social media by Elle Luna in 2014 and has become a platform for reinvention with global reach through Instagram.

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Introducing the Sweet Old World Series

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Ancestor Memories

 

Today’s post introduces work from a new series called Sweet Old World. The title comes from a Lucinda Williams song which I listened to for years until the tape sputtered out. Its bittersweet chord progressions operate as a homeopathic tincture for melancholy, virus panic, and stock market crash and immediately put things in perspective.

In going through the family archives this winter I found a small cache of silver gelatin photographs from the late 1800’s, and I have been living with them for months, buttering my toast under the watchful eye of ladies in white, their starched gowns tinted pale shades of sepia. I have always loved the mysterious blurs and emulsion fog of Tintype and other early photographic techniques. I began my work as a printmaker in film photography and etching on copper and zinc. As I have put these new images together it is through the lens of the past and the aesthetic of an earlier time. The work is composed from my original photography, paint, and varieties of modern alchemy. It falls loosely into three categories: architecture, botanica and resonant objects. I will be developing the different bodies of work over time, while I also work on paintings.

 

Farmstead landscape print by IskraFarmstead, © Iskra Fine Art.  

Nostalgia was originally described as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause” by Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term in 1688. Military physicians speculated that its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries abroad was due to earlier damage to the soldiers’ ear drums and brain cells by the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Alps.” 

 

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A Night at the Opening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum (Snow Moon)

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There is a perfume called Museum, available at discreet boutiques. When you daub it behind your ears pearls attach, shimmering and pendant from tiny diamonds. Your neck grows long and swans into the darkness of evening above a silk dress sewn from the sky of early dusk. Every word spoken, from the mouth delicately suspended above the long white neck, has the quality of pronouncement. What your eyes light upon is anointed, pedigreed, and placed on a pedestal. This girl with the pearl is the ultimate docent. She has ridden alongside the robber barons and hauled the world’s worth home, there to catalog objects that always aspired (without knowing it!) to become artifact. She finds it charming to be confused with the girl in the Vermeer, the girl hanging in the Louvre and adored by millions.

Because of the internet, which appears in the palm of my hand every five minutes, I cannot help but compare myself to that Girl. Behind my ears is simply the after-scent of shampoo from Walgreens. I wear jeans and a puffy jacket, and sterling silver ornaments, buried in unstyled hair. If I was to de-acquisition a chunk of statuary and remove it from its pedestal for my personal collection I would be hauled off to jail and my friends would leave me. Nothing says have and have-not like a museum.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum tries to meet this situation head on, so to speak, while being appropriately oblique. In the Room of the Beheaded Buddhas, each head of the half-dozen is clearly displayed as a trophy. The only thing missing is the bloodied chisel. Says the placard: These fragments of figures also reflect the difficult reality that the historical art market supplied such small, portable and alluring objects to collectors under the circumstances of colonial expansion and other forms of cultural imperialism. Explore our smartphone tour for further discussion. Should you flinch at the phrase “cultural imperialism,” remember that the museum is not running for higher office. It is simply telling it like it is.

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