Dream Gap 2025-2026
Elizabeth Johnson's mother died in 2025 after more than a decade battling dementia. As the experience of Anita's confusion, decline and death fades, Johnson's oil paintings shift away from mourning and loss toward more dreamlike aspects of entropy. Jumbling familiar subjects such as fields, houses, figures, faces, ships, animals, trees, and water in a crazy-quilt-like format, current work highlights scraped away areas of dragged color as vignettes, or loci of potential. Johnson builds her pieces by focusing on one of these loosely defined, wet-paint zones at a time, working by trial and error. Contrasting near and far; right side up, upside down, and sideways; dim and bright mimics change across both jarring and smooth transitions within dream space. Improvising how edges of the different zones might meet allows her to resolve the whole painting as a pattern of separate points of view.
Johnson's work takes cues from the way that dreams seem to be staged, and how they morph and calibrate themselves to a dreamer's shifting consciousness or directed gaze. Thresholds between partitions range from detailed to hazy and signal discontinuity, that in turn triggers the eeriness of transformation, floating, falling and flying. Standards such as overcoming barriers, surprise apparition, unfamiliar yearning and curiosity about what's beyond the periphery of dreams inform the work. She sources image fragments from The New York Times, National Geographic and her own photo albums; warping, distorting and cropping them in Photoshop to suggest mood more than story. She keeps image fragments on hand for years and sorts them into piles. Staying familiar with her images helps her to choose which she wants to paint, and she operates under the assumption that there are always multiple good choices.
Johnson premixes her palette of about sixteen to twenty oil colors, replenishing and tweaking colors daily, beginning several canvases at the start of a series by painting one or two images on each. As each surface gathers momentum, she focuses on one at a time. She mixes empty zones of color and subjects randomly, like interchangeable parts, hoping to find combinations of setting and subject that challenge realism but still function semi-logically. Joining zones of activity that feel right in the moment, she scrapes away ninety percent of what she paints, since most of her attempts fail to hold a compelling emotional charge. As destroying failed attempts becomes more commonplace, scraping and wiping away paint is as important as applying it. The cumulative process of creating and destroying precipitates as visible decisions that gain texture and possibility by sacrificing discernibility. Conceding that certain ideas don't work and destroying them or partially erasing them transfers "losing to gain" to the realm of physical beauty.
The Dream Gap series explores partitioning random-feeling images and chance paint mixtures to harness dynamic thresholds, seams or barriers. The series suggests that organized, interlocked, and incomplete embodiments of creation and destruction express that the need to know, remember, forget and let go happens everywhere and all at once.
Dimensional Paintings 2020-2025
Expressing chaos and mourning, Elizabeth Johnson’s Dimensional Paintings reflect a decade of supporting her ailing mother. While she did not consciously choose to make dementia-related paintings, her close relationship with and care for her mother has gradually infiltrated her practice. Early in her caretaking role, she made “Anti-Story” paintings that sought to empty grouped images of meaning, as a kind of working antidote to her mother’s extreme verbosity and continual need to recant personal history. That reactionary work soothed the effect of excessive narration by imagining private mental space within a matrix of random images.
As her mother’s failing memory struggles to organize itself around important words as signposts, the content they recall varies from minute to minute and day to day. Likewise, Johnson’s paintings jumble familiar subjects such as flowers, houses, figures, faces, ships, trees, and water, that she recognizes as an approximation of what it must feel like to be both set adrift yet trapped within one’s own mind. The work suggests climate instability and human-caused ecosystem collapse as congruent with her mother’s personal chaos and its effect on the artist, taking a bird's eye view of destruction and confusion to detach from it. Nonetheless, overlapping and interweaving Photoshop-manipulated images that conform to curves, folds, and waves, locate us in the thick of her mother’s and nature's drama. Johnson builds agitated, dreamlike, malleable, dimensional spaces to contemplate the mysteries created through new perspectives of order and ruin.
As she assembles parts of her paintings by trial and error, the whole grows slowly. The work, like mother’s and daughter's current conversation, diverges from past and current realities but gels around long held associations and shared emotional habits. Appreciating the beautiful qualities of loss seems to compensate for her mother's struggle, and the pain of watching one who used to talk nonstop, hesitate and come up empty. If Johnson feels a conventional story, one having a logical beginning, middle and end, coalesce while painting, she undoes her last move, preferring to highlight surprising combinations of interchangeable subjects. Meadows, ponds, trees, and thickets twist around the picture plane. People and human-made structures and technologies fold into the activity, high and low, upside down and right side up. The imagery appears to be collapsing on itself or pulling apart at the seams. Within Johnson’s paintings lie unique cues, inviting threads waiting to be tugged, a simulation of life unraveling or memory circling back on itself and shot full of holes.
Anti-Story Paintings 2017-2020
These oil paintings join unrelated subjects in a groundless, airy, imaginary environment. I call this work "anti-story" because it thwarts the urge to make sense of the world through storytelling. I depict parts of photographs as if they occupy space, and distort or wrap images on planes like wallpaper, using digital manipulation as a tool and hand-built paper models. Fragmenting and mixing images separates them temporarily from meaning, diminishing but not erasing its power. I enjoy looking at combinations of images that have no obvious reason for appearing together, those with few preexisting, well-worn associations, and feeling their lack of purpose. Working in a dream-like space challenges the idea of causality and encourages viewers to devise their own stories.