03 Magazine: September 01, 2023

Art | Magazine 67
First-hand tales of alien abductions and daytime heat that
seems to come from another solar system’s bigger star –
artist Jess Johnson is in her element.
Both are courtesy of Roswell, where she is doing a
year‐long residency in the remote high desert.
Lately, that has involved days north of 40°C and just last
month the New Mexico town held its annual UFO Festival,
which included an “amazing symposium of speakers and
panels”, she says.
“People telling their first-hand accounts of alien abductions.
“It is a dream being here.”
A dream, but no accident – Jess has had her eye on the
residency for some time, waiting for the right time to beam in.
While there, the New Zealand artist hopes to have time
and space to let her imagination journey off in some new
directions – or, perhaps more likely, some new dimensions.
Like the science fiction from which Jess draws some of her
inspiration, her art is not subject to the normal laws of physics.
Proof of that is on display from today at Tūhura Otago
Museum, where the interactive virtual reality (VR) headsetplatformed
exhibition Terminus is opening, and where her new
planetarium film XYZZY is having its international premiere.
Terminus drops viewers into five immersive worlds of Jess's
creation; psychedelic spaces that collapse the space between
the ancient and the distant future, reflecting “ideologies of
technology and flesh”.
The VR experiences are created in partnership with
filmmaker Simon Ward, who builds the minutely detailed 3D
worlds from hand drawings by Jess.
The new planetarium film draws from the same well, Simon
manipulating images from a vast database of Jess's art, setting
the whole to specially commissioned electronic music by
Andrew Clarke, Luke Rowell and Stef Animal.
Jess, who is in town for the twin unveilings, says Roswell
and her fictional worlds are connected in other ways too.
Designs created for the Terminus exhibition carry a hint of
Jess’s own familial connection to Mexico.
“My mother is Mexican American, my middle name is
Juanita – named after my grandmother.”
The Mount Maunganui-raised artist says she cannot claim
a deep connection to Mexican culture, but that part of her
family history is not unexplored.
“There is definite influence from old – what would you say?
– lineages of craft and things like that. My mother is a quilt
maker, so she was always in the corner of the lounge room
cutting up material and piecing together and making these
really elaborate patterned patchwork quilts – and I think there
is a similar construction in my drawings and the geometries
and patterns that I use, from mum’s analogue quilt making to
my analogue drawing.”
In the likes of Terminus, those beginnings become digitised
and deified, multiplied and amplified.
Christchurch art school-trained Jess has been drawing
full‐time, building these worlds for more than a decade now
in what she describes as a long, slow dredging process.
“The ideas and the nature of the world definitely wasn’t
fully formed when I started basing all my drawings within the
same realm in 2012. It has been a very organic building of
the cosmology, or the narrative and the characters, over the
past decade.”
Jess’s collaboration with Simon began a week after their
introduction by a friend, she says.
They were both aware of each other’s work and immediately
set about animating her imagery. They have not stopped.
“Quite early on, we got this commission to make a VR
artwork on one of the early developer models and that led to