Experience a unique art experience as Mark Moore Fine Art presents Clay Johnson‘s “Strata Paintings” exclusive ARTSY online exhibition. Explore the layers of memory and perception in Johnson’s art, reflecting the complex editing process of the landscape of our minds.
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Clay Johnson began work on his “Strata Series” shortly after relocating to Wyoming, and, while non-objective in nature, the paintings convey a sense of the wide open landscape of the American west.
“I think of myself as a collage artist. I’m cutting and pasting memories of my life.”
—Spalding Gray
When we think of past experiences, places we’ve visited, or people we’ve known, we’re not drawing on a unified continuum of experience. Rather these entities exist in our memories as collections of moments, collaged together and plastered with a label—School, Friend, Work. Whether very general (e.g., “Human”) or quite specific (“Stephen”), these concepts live in the mind as aggregations of snapshots, pasted together in no particular order, the most recent blended with the most distant (and all of the others) to create a representation of whatever the thing, place, person, or idea may be.
The Strata Paintings involve a kind of editing that’s similar to what our brains do in constructing images of the people and things that we remember. I layer many sections over one another, keeping the parts that I like and painting over the less memorable elements, or modifying them so that they fit with my idea of what the whole is (or should be). Just as our brains forget many unremarkable experiences, my paintings contain lots of layers beneath the visible surface, which nevertheless influence their perception in subtle ways.
Clay Johnson was born in Durham, North Carolina, where he studied art and art history at Duke University, receiving a B.A. degree in 1985. He then worked for several years as assistant to the painter Robert Natkin in Connecticut and New York City. He began showing paintings from his first series of mature work in 1998, and has since exhibited in galleries across the United States and in Europe. His work is represented in collections around the world.
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