Artist’s Statement
Connie Johnson

Fall 2005

I am a self-taught artist and have been making art off and on for the last 15 years. I make art as both a personal statement and as a form of social commentary. I usually just sit down and start working, either by making some marks on a paper, or by tearing and cutting some paper pieces. One way I develop an idea is to make many variations of what ever I’m working on, and just keep going until I’m finished with the concept. Usually I stop a piece when it looks complete to me, and when I can hold it up and recognize the integrity of the piece. A series usually ends as I move on to a new theme or concept. The work I’m doing with the Ladies is a good example. I started doing monoprints in the fall of 2003 with a vague idea of making skirts. That changed into making actual figures with paper bag heads, dressed in collage outfits and placed on the monoprints. I started writing on the pieces shortly afterwards with lists of random clichés for background, and then wrote vignettes and dialogues for the ladies. Last spring I decided that the paper bags were exhausted, so I made hair and faces for the ladies. I am still interested in writing dialogues illustrated with ladies, but I am also experimenting with contrasts in scale between the foreground and background images.

I’ve always been fascinated by fashion, style and clothing, which I see as tools of cultural assimilation and social camouflage in a world infused with inequitable distributions of power. And I’m intensely interested in the contradictions between the outer persona of an individual and their inner experience in small intimate settings. I’ve been struck recently with Robert Trivers’ view of evolution: that our survival depends on our capacity for self-deception, not to deny reality, but to avoid detection by an attacking enemy. Then I wonder what the lady wearing the outfit might say or think, if and when she ever lost her capacity for self-delusion.

At this time I am working with found household papers such as: sugar and flour bags, candy and pasta wrappers, torn scraps of wrapping paper, onion bags, and other trash, to create fantastic outfits complete with accessories. In the past I’ve made lots of abstract art using oil sticks, watercolor crayons and pencil on paper. My current work is deliberately representational.