exhibition brochure (PDF) - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ...

Erin Colleen Johnson
At heart, Erin Colleen Johnson is a storyteller, a modern-day incarnation of
the bards and griots of yore who traveled the land spinning stories and singing
songs, weaving intricate tapestries of fact and fiction. Perhaps to set the appropriate
tone one need but mention that Johnson considers Jorge Luis Borges,
that most masterful of weavers, a kindred spirit. The kernel from which
her works develop is invariably an intriguing anecdote, a harvested fact or
little-known history, deepened and elaborated through extensive historical
research and an engaged dialogue with various sites and collaborators.
On a formal level, Johnson’s approach is fundamentally situational: the final
form her installations and performances take shifts according to collaborator,
topic, and means at hand. Her works range from a samizdat pirate radio station
run from an Oakland closet to highly material experiments with the filmic
medium, to the most ephemeral of gestures and gatherings. A constant, however,
is the deeply collaborative nature of her practice, rejecting the idea of the
artist as lone creator and instead diffusing the act of imbuing meaning across
a network of agents, both inside and outside the arts. Her collaborators have
been as diverse as her own practice: fellow artists, a dancer, a graphologist, an
ice fisherman, Morse Code operators, strangers. In that sense her newest work
forms a departure of sorts. Based on boxes of handwritten sermons her grandfather,
a preacher, bequeathed to her, collaboration here is of necessity conceptual.
Johnson is often drawn to the ephemeral, if not the outright obsolete, and to
gestures that seem hopeless save to the ones enacting them. This is not a melancholic
impulse, nor a simply utopian one. Like stories proper, her works are deeply
generative; they create echoes and reverberations that reinscribe these forgotten
acts back into the social fabric of life, like ever so many tiny chain reactions.
Erin Colleen Johnson: still from Hole #1, 2013; digital video; courtesy of the artist.