Joe Johnson
The Playing Field
Joe Johnson’s fourth Gallery Kayafas exhibit – The Playing Field – continues and extends his nuanced documentation of his American experience. The early work of urban nightscapes and Midwestern weather-scapes has evolved into detailed and rich descriptions of mega-churches and, now, the casinos in Reno, Nevada, perhaps not so much of a leap…
Johnson photographs the exteriors in the parched and dry desert, allowing the bright intensity of the sun to render the bleached surfaces as washed out and flat, almost quiet; juxtaposed to the shiny, reflective, color saturated interiors whose loud colors, bright lights, reflective surfaces, mirrored walls, disorienting patterns of the carpets and wall treatments conspire to create a fantasy and absence of a sense of time.
Joe Johnson earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from the Massachusetts College Art. His work has been reviewed and/or published in Art in America, The NY Times, The Boston Globe, Esquire Magazine Russia, and YVI Magazine in the Netherlands. Johnson has participated in exhibitions at galleries and museums including Cleveland Art Museum, deCordova Museum, Mass MoCA, and Gallery Kayafas. Johnson’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the deCordova Museum in Lincoln MA, and the Beach Art Museum. He is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Art Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Christine Collins
Oil/Cloth
Exhibiting for the first time at Gallery Kayafas, Christine Collins is presenting her series, Oil/Cloth. Saturated in color these large format images reveal the fragments left from everyday dining…what remains for the compost pile…from the ripeness to the decay.
The series Oil/Cloth engages idealized visions of nature, the rot of domestic life, and the seduction of the artificial. The images navigate the tension between a romanticized representation of the natural world, healthy and unaffected by our presence, with our shifting and often fraught relationship to food (images) as a cultural and psychological force. Perfection and abundance is vitiated by putrescence and decay.
“By utilizing vestiges of my own family’s food, I implicate my own desires, hungers and consumption in the work. Light, plastic, detritus and fabric are interwoven to describe both the familiar and the transformed. Referencing tropes of the still life tradition, I look for an equivocation between the elevated moment of ripeness and the inevitable next stage that my photographs reveal. Like the anonymous fabricators of the tablecloths that recur in this series, I am interested in the ways our anxiety about nature and domesticity is activated in the assorted reproductions we make of a world we can no longer either fully inhabit or entirely avoid.” -Christine Collins
Christine Collins received a BA from Skidmore College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has recently exhibited at the Flash Forward Festival, The Portland Museum of Art and the University of Texas, Austin. Her work has been featured in The Portland Press Herald, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Town and Country Magazine, Esquire Magazine, and Hawk & Handsaw: Journal of Creative Sustainability, among others. She has been a Critical Mass Finalist, nominated for the Prix Pictet, and selected as a Review Santa Fe 100. Collins is the recipient of a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the St. Botolph Club Artist Fellowship. She has taught at Lesley Art + Design since 2004, where she is currently an Assistant Professor and the Chair of BFA Photography.