_1215_fine_art_catalogue

Samuel Curtis Johnson
scjohnson3@hotmail.co.uk | 07795 563787
The installations and paintings I produce connect to research and ideas
of mapping positioned within the fields of archaeology and geology.
Mapping through deep earth excavation, the structuring – stratification
– of rock layers, and the time-based layering of sedimentation –
superposition. I am interested in ‘phasing’, the concentrated
accumulation of earth materials connected with land use, and in the
anomalies it produces within the earth’s strata. Interruptions and
disruptions produced by agriculture, industry, excavation and building.
Using these ideas I attempt to physically construct and layer spaces
through installation and paintings, deploying spatial contaminations /
anomalies that interfere with the architectural orthodoxy of the spaces.
This allows me to alter the perceptual experience of the viewer and
their interaction with the work. Through this I have become interested
in awkward navigation that plays on ‘barriers’, permeable borders, and
that activates thinking and orientation around the ‘front and back’ of
the work.
The installations provide a physical platform for these ideas, placing the
viewer in immersed navigational and spatial relationships with the
space. Lights respond to the movement of the viewer, flickering,
creating sensory experiences that further disorientate and disrupt a
navigation of the space. The paintings provide an alternate
representation of phased layers, formed with marks and bands of colour
that cross and contaminate from one to another. The paintings optically
shift depending on how the viewer encounters them, as iridescent
pigments alter and interfere with underlying colours.
‘Navigational’, 2015
‘Navigational’, 2015
‘Unititled’, 2015 (gloss, oil, pearlescent, iridescent on
reverse side of canvas)
Samuel Curtis Johnson
82
83