Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson’s multi-media installations comprise an imaginative space where paper figures float in the dystopic landscape of urban chaos. Johanson’s installations, an amalgam of colors and shapes, represent an intensified world where individuals strive to make human connections amid the clamor of an alienating world of brick walls and cramped suburban houses.

Johanson will present different platforms and homemade tables with buildings including suburban houses and a variety of buildings found throughout the city. This installation will create an expanse of balance, whimsy and tragedy, an expressive and highly lyrical terrain. The process by which he builds up this imaginative world is uniquely his own, and presupposes an intense involvement with the physicality of his materials, whether wood, paper or the simple expressiveness of a line.

Working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, and installation, Johanson’s central concerns involve the search for, if not a perfect humanity, then brief moments of insight, the private awakenings toward joy and beauty that exist within each person. Johanson’s work celebrates the triumph of the human will to achieve a kind of “inner faith” in human possibility, in the ways in which individuals come to know themselves amidst the welter of an ever-shifting urban landscape.

Johanson has said of his work: “I try to show people -- happy people, sad people, angry people, people who drink and do drugs too much; business people who work too much. I try to show society as a whole.”

Pressetext

Chris Johanson