Bronze, zebra, black soap, wax
78.8. x 56.2 x 50.5 cm
 
Bronze, zebra, black soap, wax
78.8. x 56.2 x 50.5 cm
 

Rashid Johnson is best known for a practice that takes up objects and materials we’re familiar with in composite works, occupying articles of the everyday in a process he has called hijacking the domestic.[1] Forcing them together in unprecedented and generative ways in painting, sculpture and mixed media installations, often these materials and references are highly personal, plucked from his childhood and upbringing in inner-city and suburban Chicago, Illinois. They include a range of political and musical figures, literary titles and aesthetic traditions, alongside cosmetic products and features of design history which, presented together abstractly, are often attributed broader significance for their relation to larger American and African-American historical narratives. By exposing these references to each other in sculptural and painterly amalgamations, and to the viewer in the form of complete works, Johnson asks questions about the relationship between individual and collective histories, and notions of shared experience. His work investigates how individuals might use objects and cultural references to situate themselves in larger chronicles, and draws parallels between this process and an artist’s employment of canonical references to both ground and generate new works or meaning.
 
Untitled (Bronze Chair), 2013 is emblematic of Johnson’s impulse for alloying sources. Produced for his exhibition, New Growth, which took place at Ballroom Marfa, Texas in 2013, it forms part of a larger body of work devised in response to the gallery’s location, and the artist’s self-posed question: “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?”[2] The exhibition drew from a wide pool of sources, bringing them together to produce an entirely new landscape: an imagined setting conceived from materials, forms and ideas that surrounded Johnson in his childhood and adolescence, and which have continued to influence him in his adult life and professional career. They are elements which, in the context of their historical, social and cultural origins, can be conceived as being deeply embedded in the American fabric. Appearing throughout the space at Ballroom Marfa in multiple variations, Johnson’s bronze chairs, sometimes isolated, sometimes positioned over Persian rugs, vividly recalled a set of earlier works which featured in his exhibition at the South London Gallery, Shelter, one year previously: daybeds inspired by the Freudian couch, also installed on Persian rugs, upholstered with zebra skin cushions and coated in the same dressing of black soap and wax.[3]
 
Though formally similar, the hypothesis which sparked New Growth adds another dimension to these works: the congruence of material elements which combine in works like Untitled (Bronze Chair), 2013 occurs through the fictional imagining of a meeting between three historical and cultural figures. As Johnson said in a 2019 interview, “It was explained to me once that creativity is best thought of as a person who is willing to connect disconnected things. Artists are not looking for the logical solution, or the most tasteful or pragmatic solution. We’re often looking for the disparate solution, the disconnected, desperate, unhealthy, unthoughtful solution that we can bring into the world, and maybe it changes how we think.”[4] The work which results from Johnson’s perspective has a distinct modus operandi. In 2012, Huey Copeland wrote that “Johnson’s work differently negotiates the ways in which meaning, racial and otherwise, is now generated by specific visual phenomena that consistently gesture elsewhere for their charge — call it an aesthetics of misdirection.” His conflation of elements in singular works and his broader practice amounts to nothing short of a philosophical consideration of what Copeland calls “the problem of being in contemporary culture.”[5] – Elsa Gray
 
 
 
 

[1] Art21. “Rashid Johnson Makes Things to Put Things On.” YouTube video. YouTube, 20 June 2011. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qkDIjpbtiQ
[2] https://www.ballroommarfa.org/archive/event/rashid-johnson/
[3] “Rashid Johnson: Shelter,” press release for exhibition at South London Gallery, 2012. Available at https://www.southlondongallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2012RJ_gallery-guide.pdf
[4] Dodie Kazanjian, “These Are Challenging Times: Rashid Johnson’s New Work is a Powerful Response to Modern Anxieties.” Web article. Vogue, 12 November 2019. Available at https://www.vogue.com/article/rashid-johnson-new-work-with-powerful-response
[5] Huey Copeland, “Reviews: Rashid Johnson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,” Artforum, Summer 2012, 303.

Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history.After studying in the photography department of the Art Instituteof Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media – including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. Johansons work has been exhibited all around the world, he won the David C. Driskell Prize in 2012 and released his movie Native Son. As well as his books Rashid Johnson: sharpening my oyster knife and Rashid Johnson: Shelter. In 2015 he won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Television Movie for his movie. 

This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License as well as from Hauser & Wirth .