Susan R. Johnson, submitted artwork
Susan R. Johnson
Painting
Richmond, VA
Susan R. Johnson creates meticulously crafted worlds that mirror our own while slipping into the uncanny space of a parallel reality. Often site-responsive and developed in collaboration with museums and libraries, her work has been presented in more than forty solo exhibitions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her practice has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and by residencies at institutions including MacDowell, Art Omi, Golden Foundation, Cité Internationale des Arts and the American Academy in Rome. Born in San Francisco and raised between Los Angeles and the New York metropolitan area, Johnson earned an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Syracuse University, with additional study in London and Florence. She is a Professor of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and St. Mary’s City, Maryland.
Works
Susan R. Johnson, submitted artwork
My Teenage Years explores the female body as both a contemporary object and a manufactured ideal onto which cultural fantasies of beauty and desire are projected until the body itself becomes awesome, even sublime. I create symmetrical figures that exaggerate and expose extreme idealizations of femininity. These bodies are not portraits but cultural composites. What initially appears perfected is gradually revealed as unnatural, uncanny. The project weaves together two interrelated threads: my personal history growing up in mid-century modern America with a self-fashioning mother, and a research-based investigation of consumer culture as disseminated through media aimed at women and girls. Drawing from mass-market magazines and instructional literature of the 1960s and 1970s, I examine how dominant norms of femininity, self-regulation, and aspiration were produced and internalized. Costumed bodies inhabit familiar poses and gestures, exposing feminineness not as an innate essence but as performance, a role rehearsed, disciplined, and culturally assigned. Each image originates on the computer, where one side of the body is isolated and mirrored, then enlarged, printed on watercolor paper, and mounted on wood panels. Referencing traditions of portraiture and narrative painting, meticulously hand-painted passages coexist with reimagined, pixelated photographic imagery.
