Erin Johnson "Nightshade"

About

Erin Johnson's exhibition NIGHTSHADE presents videos, sculptures, and photographs that explore the artist’s ongoing interest in the complexity of collectivity, the wide-ranging consequences of scientific research, as well as dissidence, desire, and the queer body. 

I might not be here when you come - a new single-channel video - takes as its starting point Solanum plastisexum - an Australian bush tomato whose sexual expression has confounded scientists and appears to be unpredictable and unstable, challenging even the fluid norms of the plant kingdom. The video was filmed at Bucknell University’s Solanum plastisexum lab and the Australia section in Los Angeles’s Huntington Botanical Garden and the video voice-over is an amalgamation of texts including love letters between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, and interviews with botanist Tanisha Williams. 

In an adjacent series of photographs and video installations, a group of friends, peers, and lovers engage in collective queer and desirous exchanges such as eating tomatoes in a field and floating together in a lake. 

Reflecting on feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies,” the exhibition considers questions surrounding the interrelationship between scientific and political practices and the reinvention of what it means to be human.

Erin Johnson is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her single and multi-channel video installations blend documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices and foreground the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge. Her work has been exhibited at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Vox Populi, and the Telfair Museums. She received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works.