STATEMENT

My sculpture is directly connected to ideas and often addresses issues of social, political, and cultural import.   As an artist, I find the most challenging forms and concepts at the intersection of the visual and the verbal.   The works in this sample include images from the two most recent installments of “ The Séance Series,” a series of drawings and sculptural “tableaus.” Begun in 2000, “ The Séance Series” suggests imagined meetings between unlikely pairs; creative individuals that never met during their lifetimes:   Emily Dickinson with Marcel Duchamp, Hildegard of Bingen with Herman Melville, Bessie Smith with Ludwig van Beethoven and Audre Lorde with Abraham Lincoln. 

Each of the pairs in “ The Séance Series” plays a game.   Bessie Smith and Ludwig Van Beethoven meet at the piano.   Lorde and Lincoln play “bridge.”   This bridge is not a card game, but a physical, symbolic span across an obstacle.   I think Audre Lorde would have confronted Lincoln on issues of race, power, and privilege, so it is Lincoln who must build the bridge.   Not a straightforward crossing, this is a difficult, jagged transition; composed of huge steps, twists, inclines, and internal tensions.   At the top of the center of the crossing is a “spirit-level” symbolic of the quest to equalize and create a more level ground.   Beneath the bridge sits the “house.” Emblematic of the existing social structure, “the master's house,” is the obstacle that must be bridged with understanding and common ground, level ground, so that together Lorde and Lincoln can dismantle its walls and work toward a just future.

 

Carla Rae Johnson

 

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CARLA RAE JOHNSON

620 Nelson Ave. Peekskill, NY 10566
(914) 737-7375
website: carlaraejohnson.com

SELECTED AWARDS
2005	New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Sculpture
2002	Westchester Arts Council, Design Commission for Cultural Tourism Center, White Plains, NY Director's Choice Award, Westchester Biennial 2002, Castle Gallery, New Rochelle, NY
1995	Studios Midwest Artist in Residency, June-August, Galesburg, IL
1990	Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
PUBLICATIONS
2003	College Art Association National Conference 2003, Search/Research: Artists in the Archives, NYC
2000	A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, 2 nd Edition, Richard Kostelanetz
1992	Who's Who in American Art
1997	Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art , Susan Danly, Editor, U. of Mass. Press
1989	Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women Judy Collischan Van Wagner, Hudson Hills Books, NYC
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2004	Maxwell Fine Arts , “Transforming Identities,” Peekskill, NY Ford Piano , Bessie Smith Meets Beethoven , (Installation), Peekskill, NY The Peekskill Project , “Flood” (a site-specific installation) Pugsley Park, Peekskill, NY
2002	Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts: Ceres Project Room , Drawings and Sculpture from: The Séance Series NYC
2000	One Station Plaza , Emily Dickinson Meets Marcel Duchamp: from The Séance Series, Peekskill, NY
1997	Ceres Gallery, The Last Chance Salon: Games for the Millennium , NYC Westchester Gallery , Selections from The Last Chance Salon, White Plains, NY
1995	Windows on Greene Street , Errors Selavy, Installation, SOHO, NYC
1994	SOHO 20 Gallery , Spirit and Substance: Sculptural Lecterns & the Spoken Word, NYC
1991	Artspace , Gray Matters: The Last Library, New Haven, CT Kingsborough Art Gallery , CUNY, Gray Matters: The Last Library, Brooklyn, NY
1990	SOHO 20 Gallery , Gray Matters: The Last Library , NYC
1989	Franklin and Marshall College Art Gallery , Solo Exhibition, Lancaster, PA
1987	SOHO 20 Gallery , Studio Equipment Sale: Sculpture Based on Artists' Tools, NYC
1985	SOHO 20 Gallery , Sculpture and Drawings, NYC
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2007	Fine Arts Gallery, Westchester Community College , Common Ground: Proposals for Public Art , Valhalla, NY
2006	Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art: The Peekskill Project 2006 – Collaborative Works on Paper, Peekskill, NY
2005	Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art: The Peekskill Project 2005 – Spirits of the Underground Railroad Main Line Art Center Rearranged/Redefined: Domestic Objects Reconsidered , Curated by Mary Salvante, Haverford, PA
2004	The Peekskill Project 2004 – Flood, Installation in Pugsley Park, Peekskill, NY HEREArt , EA50 Curated by Sherry Mayo, SoHo, NYC Ceres Gallery , Constellation , Curated Group Show, Chelsea, NYC The Arts Exchange, Westchester Arts Council , Before & After: Imagining Public Art in Westchester , White Plains, NY
2002	The Arts Exchange: Westchester Arts Council , Tributaries: Six Sculptors Respond to the Hudson River , White Plains, NY Castle Gallery , College of New Rochelle, Westchester Biennial 2002, New Rochelle, NY Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement, “The Flag Project,” NYC Sonoma State University Art Gallery , “ Across the Generations: An Homage to Virginia Woolf …,” Rohnert Park, CA
2001	Festival Theater , Sculpture exhibit with World Premiere of Hildegard: Sybil of the Rhine, Blooming Grove, NY The Loveland Museum , World Peace Through Art , (Two artists each from: U.S., Korea, and Japan), Loveland, CO
1997	Mead Museum of Art, Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art, Susan Danly Curator, Amherst, MA
1995	Snug Harbor Cultural Center , Women Sculptors of the ‘90s Part 1, C. Streifer-Rubenstein, Curator, Staten Island, NY
1991	Queens Museum of Art at Paine Webber Art Gallery , Ten From Queens, NYC Heckscher Museum of Art , More Books as Art, Anna C. Knoll, Curator, Huntington, NY
1989	Hillwood Art Gallery , Lines of Vision , Judy Collischan Van Wagner, Curator, Greenvale, NY Blum-Hellman Gallery , Lines of Vision , NYC National Museum of Women in the Arts , Lines of Vision , Washington, DC Yale University Art Gallery , Lines of Vision , New Haven, CT

 

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