Barriers & Passages: Josh Johnson at Third Street on Kittson

“Barriers and Passages,” the current exhibit at the Third Street Gallery on Kittson in Grand Forks, features the work of sculptor Josh Johnson. Johnson received his BFA from UND and is presently completing his MFA at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. His most recent body of work makes use of the ineffable sensations he experiences while trying to make sense of the world around him.
Johnson’s sculptures utilize common materials, such as wood glue, rope and carpet tacks, which create surfaces that cover underlying structures made out of polystyrene foam (styrofoam). Each piece is reminiscent of something familiar, like a comet or a tree stump, but the complete recognition of their identities is obscured by Johnson’s process. The resulting works of art communicate a reality lost somewhere between thought and emotion, and give shape to an inner world beyond the confines of language.

One of the strongest aspects of the works featured in “Barriers and Passages” is their ability to conjure up familiar associations without completely dictating their ultimate meanings. Their ambiguity can inspire free associations in the mind of the viewer, who is left to his or her own devices to translate their significance. The works from “Barriers and Passages” are radically different, and naturally more mature, than the art Johnson made while at UND. Back in those days, Johnson used the lost wax technique to create bronze casts of grotesque expressions of the human form, which he integrated with rusted machine parts and oxidized industrial doodads.

His BFA exhibit featured seven of these creations, which illustrated the seven deadly sins of Christianity. The works were powerful and impressive, but subtlety was not one of their virtues. Johnson had a clear idea of what he wanted to communicate, and he used clever visual metaphors to do so. One of those works depicted a rendition of a bloated nude humanoid, not unlike the tortured creatures from a Tool video, consuming a handful of rusted nails to exemplify the deadly sin of gluttony. The viewer had little difficulty making the connection. The meaning of Johnson’s current work, however, is anything but obvious. I am tempted to label them as formalist, but they have enough narrative qualities about them to keep them interesting.

“Stay out of my dreams,” the largest of his six works on display, stands roughly five feet tall and is constructed out of polystyrene foam. It looks like a meteor frozen in time, a molten stalagmite caught in mid-formation, or an alien’s psychedelic toy spinning otherworldly sounds from its violent vortex. It has a strikingly vibrant color, with bright orange and yellow hues. The color is more concentrated at its base, and creates a distinct boundary between its top and bottom sections. Amazingly, the colors were achieved by coating the polystyrene structure with nothing but gallons of ordinary wood glue. No other pigments were added to the glue, but it looks like it was painstakingly painted. According to the artist, the color will change over time as the wood glue cures, which begs the question, “Is it ever the same sculpture?”

“Ghosts” is the only piece in the show that is mounted on the wall. Two forms reminiscent of charred tree stumps hang perpendicular to the gallery wall. It too was made from polystyrene foam. Johnson used shavings from “Stay out of my dreams” for its rich texture, and spray painted it black to complete the surface. The stark contrast between the white wall and its textured black surfaces makes the piece seem evocatively out of context, like it was unearthed from an excavation of a petrified forest and put on display to remind us of our mortality. It brings to mind the transitory nature of our existence and serves to remind us that someday we will all indeed become ghosts.

My favorite piece from “Barriers and Passages” is titled “Displaced.” It’s a smaller scale sculpture, roughly a foot in diameter. A lone appendage protrudes from and supports a central mass, which is shaped sort of like a bio-mechanical gum drop. The majority of the central mass is plated with carpet tacks, the heads of which create a surface not unlike scales. The central mass is divided by a segmented band, and the appendage seems to be coated with a metallic substance. It appears as though it could move about the gallery, if only the appendage would slither back and forth to propel it forward. “Displaced” reminds me of a creature from another world whose only purpose is to protect itself from its environment. I can imagine a mutant alien creature inhabiting the armored central mass, like a turtle in its shell, exposing only that which can enhance its survival. A metaphor for the emotional armor we all wear?

As one can tell from the above descriptions, Johnson’s work can be interpreted in multiple ways. Each piece has the ability to evoke vaguely familiar sensations, but a complete explanation of their significance lies just out of reach. It’s as if Johnson gave form to the “can’t quite put a finger on it” phenomenon. This was accomplished, in part, by recontextualizing conventional materials to create novel surfaces for polystyrene forms. The use of familiar materials in unfamiliar contexts causes a disruption in the typical mental categories we use when making sense of our perceptual experiences. Our cognitive systems must create new schemas beyond the bounds of our past experiences to accommodate for this disruption. The new schemas latch onto existing categories in a complex network of associations and possibilities.
When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, new psychological territory is created. “Barriers and Passages” succeeds at bringing the audience closer to the fringes of their psyches by communicating an intensely personal vision of an inner reality that is both hauntingly familiar and agonizingly alien.

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What: “Barriers & Passages”
When: Now - Oct. 3
Where: Third Street Gallery, Grand Forks
Cost: Free