Material World | Mary Johnson

About the Artist:

Mary Johnson’s new work is created in response to recycled and cast-off materials, gathered from thrift stores, gifted from friends, and collected off the streets around her neighborhood. Transforming and reassembling these objects intuitively, Mary considers material histories and narrative potentials, as well as her own haptic responses to physical traces of their past use. Informed by contemporary sculptural and craft practices, the resulting works evoke, rather than illustrate, ideas of continuity, adaptation, and change. In the works Mary has created over the last decade, she has become more and more aware of the seasonal, generational, and regional dynamics which dictate her access to the diverse collections she works with. Mary notices the cycles as previous generations' cast-offs become thrift-store merchandise before disappearing from availability.

Whether considering a collection of secondhand sea shells and questioning the ethics of their original gathering, or combing through disheveled, plastic Halloween party wigs discarded after one night of use, Mary is also grappling with the simultaneous natures of such materials to be both aesthetically seductive and ecologically problematic. Through reintegrating notions of time and labor into her handling of these seemingly disposable materials, Mary reanimates our intimate relationship with the aesthetics, natural and industrial processes, and objecthood of our culture’s cast-offs, and honors the complexities which go hand-in-hand with our consumption.

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