Artlink Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present The Red Planet by Mary Johnson of Alfred, NY.

In this solo exhibition, Mary Johnson (Alfred, NY) looks within and outside our collective American experience to examine how myth plays a role in how we experience ourselves and others. Utilizing drawing and collage, landscape and archetype become central in this narrative, where the Red Planet stands in for the ultimate terra incognita.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, July 27th from 5-8 pm!

The Red Planet

Who are we?

Where are we now?

Where are we going?

Where do I end and you begin?

Where is the space between where we are and where we will be?

We see ourselves and others through myth, it is how we launch ourselves into our roles, onto our stage. Mars stands in for the ultimate terra incognita. It is a place where our ambitions and fears don costumes of rock and flesh. Landscapes are acted upon and within, but spaces becoming active participants in the stories we tell as well. The rocks cry out.

The figures within these drawings are hybridized from American mythology, contemporary culture and the classic swashbuckling tale, Journey to the West. Superimposed upon one another in ways that make them unrecognizable as individuals, their redundant qualities became doubled in a way that makes them archetypes.

The other becomes us.

We become the other.

The space between us is traversed and folded.

The same story is told again and again.

Sun Wukong, Wolverine and the cowboy become the culminated anti-hero. Bezos, Guanyin and Lady Liberty become the demigod upon whom we wish and hope for a whim of benevolence, but whose callousness would make a queen bee blush. Blue Ox and the Son of Ao Run are Sidekick, cardboard supporting roles whose stories we ignore.

Heroes don’t rescue, villains don’t crush- but everyone acts. Struggling towards atonement, power and love, we journey westward, upward, and back onto ourselves.

About the Artist

Mary Johnson makes installations, works on paper and animations that interrogate how perception narrates our experiences. She has shown her work globally including the New York Hall of Science, the Nekrasov Library in Moscow, and the Cube Art Museum in Shanghai. Nationally, her work has been shown at BOX13 (Houston), Coconino Center for the Arts (Flagstaff) and Fort Worth Arts, among others. Her work has been in exhibitions at CICA Museum in South Korea, the Consell of Formentera in Spain, and collected by the Shanghai Art Collections Museum. Additionally, her work has been included in multiple international publications, including Rebeka Elizegi’s book Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists (Madrid). Joining the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in 2019, she has taught at multiple institutions in China, including the Central Academy of Fine Art and as an invited critic to Tsinghua University.

Johnson currently works at Alfred University within the School of Art & Design as the Director of Foundations.

Education

Gordon College, Wenham, Massachussetts

State University of New York, Buffalo, New York