Body Without Organs will deconstruct and integrate material objects and visual imagery, centering feminine and queer ways of seeing and making. This project will consist of a series of wall hanging and freestanding works. As a queer fem artist, Johnston is constantly navigating how patriarchal expectations are placed on her body inside and outside the domestic sphere. These pieces will investigate traditional modes of women's labor, in terms of their unique material and performative involvements, primarily through cooking and fiberwork.
Women often take on the responsibility of cooking in many cultures: cooking is cultural, communal, personal, it often impacts our relationships and our views about the world. Johnston is interested in the performative aspects of cooking, yet subverting the process by producing visceral objects, in the form of bioplastic. Her recipe incorporates cornstarch, vinegar, water and glycerin which she boils in a pot on the stove. This produces a translucent material that can be impregnated with different objects. Most commonly, Johnston incorporates “identity objects” which she views as hair, teeth, and
other personal effects. Once the sheets cure, which can take up to a week, the identity objects are forced into stasis, moments viewers must contend with when looking at her work.
Johnston uses fiber in much of her work as a way to understand her historical identity; her maternal grandmother supported her family for decades as a seamstress in Los Angeles, CA between the 1960s-1980s. Johnston, seeks to reveal the ambivalence of these forms by highlighting both their aesthetic possibilities and hidden violences.
In both fiberwork and cooking, a relationship exists between the materiality of the production, the labor required, and the social location of a feminized, woman’s body as the labor producer. An aesthetic corruption of domestic work represents the historical repression of Johnston’s body, which has been censored by cultural and familial expectations of body image and sexual orientation.
The intersection between materiality and production of work engages my practice, and my work investigates these discrete moments. Exploring themes of women's work, labor, and identity natural materials and found objects are utilized in my sculptures and installations, employing their forms and textures. Examining an intuitive practice, I draw on significant autobiographical experiences and often relates to internal and external dispositions within the physical environments of individual situations.
To achieve this, identity objects (hair and teeth and other personal effects) are incorporated as a way to challenge my audience to think about their own relationship and association to the work. Even everyday circumstances provide examples of the inherent tension between physical and emotional spaces. A distinct relationship exists between the two; our emotions construct the way we both experience and inhabit space, and vice versa. These tensions and differences are the moments I challenge myself to examine, internalize and reconstruct for my viewers in a way that invites a similar level of introspection.
Kelly R Johnston was born in Washington DC in 1991. In 2015, she graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, with a BA in Anthropology and BA in Studio Art. She currently lives and works in Chapel Hill, NC. Johnston exhibits internationally and extensively in the US south. Her work explores inherent tensions between emotional and physical discomfort by using natural materials on large scales to create sculpture and installation, in hopes viewers connect and address issues in their own lives. Her use of identity objects, such as hair, teeth and other personal effects, can be seen as a common theme throughout her work, along with incorporating mixed-media processes to create visceral environments. Johnston finished the Post-Graduate Residency at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA in winter 2018.
