Exploring Artists’ Imaginative Worlds Through ‘Winter Color’ Exhibition at Kishka | Seven Days
Can invented worlds share common ground? They do in “Winter Color,” a bright and vibrant show on view through February 15 at Kishka Gallery & Library in White River Junction. Cocurators Ben Finer and Bevan Dunbar have brought together a handful of pieces from three artists who create their own distinct visual languages yet whose aesthetics and techniques share a close conversation.
Jess Johnson’s Immersive Trippy Universe
Jess Johnson is known for her trippy, sci-fi-inspired imagery, which starts out in her drawings and gouache paintings and has made its way into major installations, videos, fashion, and virtual reality simulations. Imagine a 1970s Samuel Delany space orgy that takes place inside a Minecraft simulation of an M.C. Escher drawing, and you’re nearly there.
Elements in her work include snakes and worms, stylized bodies in all hues, gaping faces without noses, circuits and tubes, and third eyes. There’s a voracious quantity of pattern, details piled on details to create something immersive and enigmatic. It’s not surprising that Johnson has projected her imagery as video in planetarium-style dome screenings; it’s very surprising that, with the help of her mom, she has made it into quilts.
Two of those, “Flesh Nebula” and “Necrotic Scroll,” are on view at Kishka. Johnson lives and works in New York; her mother, Cynthia Johnson, lives in Whangarei, New Zealand, where Jess grew up. Jess combines hand-drawn elements from her paintings in Photoshop and has them commercially printed on fabric. Cynthia then adds pieced borders of her design and machine-quilts the entire work.
Edie Fake’s Illuminated Artifacts
Quilting literally gives Johnson’s imagery another dimension, one that’s tactile and real; the works read more like Tarot cards or illuminated manuscripts than video games. The addition of detail and labor lend gravitas and care to Johnson’s dizzying visual vocabulary. The patterns that abound in the quilts play off the other works in the show.
Edie Fake, who lives near Joshua Tree National Park in California and is known for his illustrations and graphic novels, presents three works from “Shell Game,” a series of 16-by-20-inch gouache paintings on panel. Each features an abstract pattern set off by careful line gradients that create a neon glow from afar. Fake’s bright palette — yellow and magenta but also taupe and coral, muddier colors that nonetheless seem luminescent — is set off by black areas that suck in the light.
According to Kishka co-owner Finer, Fake uses specially formulated black paint to achieve this velvety effect. That, and the way Fake carefully stripes the edges of his panels, makes the paintings feel like artifacts from a glamorous vintage casino. His earlier work explored architecture as a way of expressing trans identity; these panels carry that forward, articulating a queer space without reference to location.
Jessy Park’s Calmly Ordered World
Like Fake, Jessy Park uses architecture to convey an identity where language fails. Park is a well-known artist with autism from Williamstown, Mass., who has made her precise paintings for decades. She uses near-symmetry and geometric forms to map out a calmly ordered yet exuberantly colorful world. She often integrates pastel rainbow colors into her buildings, as in “The Mount,” where she joyfully renders a stately old home.
A 2004 article in the Folk Art Messenger — which, like much of the writing about Park, conveys unfortunately dated attitudes about autism — talks about Park’s heightened color sensitivity and the meticulous way she mixes paints, never using a hue straight from the tube. That’s most visible in “Jail Window,” a 1981 painting that showcases Park’s facility with gradations so close they’re barely distinguishable — but highly effective in describing her worlds.
Each of these artists has created such a distinctive visual syntax for themselves that it’s remarkable to look at their larger bodies of work and find pieces that could easily fit in each other’s portfolios. In “Winter Color,” they’re speaking the same language.
Conclusion
The world of art is a colorful and diverse one, with artists like Jess Johnson, Edie Fake, and Jessy Park pushing the boundaries of imagination and creativity. Through their unique visual languages and shared conversations, they invite us to explore their worlds and find common ground in the midst of their inventive creations. Visit Kishka Gallery & Library in White River Junction to immerse yourself in the vibrant world of ‘Winter Color’ before it closes on February 15.
