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ACTAEON'S HOUNDS

Melanie Johnson          

melanielynnjohnson.com

@melanie.l.johnson

july/august 2024 

        580 Case Avenue, St Paul, MN 

@ce.studios.artboard

Actaeon's Hounds.tif

Case Edgerton Studios

ARTBOARD

a community art site at 580 Case​

Case Edgerton Studios is proud to present ACTAEON'S HOUNDS

by Kansas City-based artist

Melanie Johnson

Johnson’s vigorous surfaces are hewn from a frenzy of articulated gesture built atop embodied cognition and a close reading of authored form. 

Actaeon's Hounds, 98x104", charcoal on Arches

Artist Statement- Melanie Johnson

 

My drawings recall the sensory and emotional connections inherent in my bonds with animals and the natural landscape, and the ways in which animals provide some of my earliest empathetic relationships and routine caregiving experiences. Examining these formative bonds has caused me to return to physical and psychological landscapes connected to the life cycles of animals, and has made me increasingly aware of existential parallels and patterns in human behavior. Mining the imagery of familiar landscapes gives form to a dissonant accrual of lived experiences, personal iconography, loss, and sense of place.

I think about the relationship of time and narrative selection when making drawings, both in terms of constructing a story through representational imagery, and in the tactile manipulation of materials to communicate an idea. ​My drawings serve simultaneously as narrative vehicles and as physical artifacts that reflexively reference the history of their own manifestation, giving agency to narrative conceit and suspension of disbelief, but also providing a connection to haptic and emotional experience. Surface palimpsest- the layering of marks and images- and indexical recording- that all of the marks are visible- are active metaphors in my work. I want to be physically present, through mark-making, as the teller of the story.

The imagery I choose is specific, but is often also disjointed and incongruous. ​Condensing narrative events factors strongly in my imagery​, ​and reflects the human habit of subjective selectivity in recounting an experience. The Sicilian literary phrase, "Lu cuntu nun metti tempu" translates to “time takes no time in a story”. In the telling of a story, it allows for temporal incongruities to exist in close proximity, collapsing and expanding time and memory at will, while condensing the gravity of an experience or making salient those rhymed moments in time. I think this collapsing and expanding allows us to empathize across time and distance, and I find that it happens regularly in experiencing works of art. In 2013, I was fortunate to view the exhibition, “Ice Age Art: The arrival of the modern mind”, at the British Museum, which had on display the oldest known representational sculptures and images. I was struck by how masterfully the material was manipulated and how sensitively human and animal subjects were articulated. This collective evidence of the innate human need to record and communicate through a material medium had a profound effect on me. What was so striking about studying these artifacts and images closely, is that the collapse of time and condensing of human tactile experience is often embedded in a few marks-- the deft inflection of the craftsman’s hand can communicate a felt experience which carries across millennia to resonate deeply with our own contemporary lives.

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