Mariah Anne Johnson explores the physical realities of bodily experience and art making in the landscape through drawing, movement, and installation. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, she focused on art and literature at Rice University while performing with Rice Dance Theater, earning her MFA from the University of Illinois in 2006. Her work has been shown around the United States and abroad.
Through teaching, international residencies, and open-ended multi-media projects, she keeps her studio practice open to new ideas and methodologies. She currently lives with her family in Los Angeles, where she continues to find the adventure in art making.
Artist Location: Los Angeles, CA
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PARTICIPATION
Earmaginations [silent videos] On-site June 3rd and online June 11th
Zaratan Baseboard Movement
I am concerned with the poetics of gaps, of unexamined spaces behind doors and under stairways, between trees and under rocks. Between initial impressions and deeper, more elaborate understandings. Between memories. Between articulated thoughts. Between pockets of usable time. Because these spaces are overlooked, awkward, or otherwise not functional, they are vessels for the imagination to fill with processes and materials that are themselves awkward or fantastical. I explore such gaps through the methodologies of drawing, installation, and contemporary dance, using the accumulation of material and the shape of my own body to illuminate their potential.
Zaratan Baseboard Movement depicts a physical exploration, a bodily getting-to-know-you, of my empty studio space at the beginning of my 2022 residency at Zaratan Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon, Portugal.
Rehearsal