Art Talk with Bethany Johnson – 11/20/13

Wednesday, November 20 | 6:30pm – 7:30pm

Join The MAC in an Art Talk with Bethany Johnson. in conjunction with her exhibition “Forces, the Will and the Weather“.

Forces, the Will and the Weather is an ongoing body of drawings, including two site-specific large scale works, that render a variety of natural sources with an exacting, scientific process. In tight parallel lines drawn with fine technical pens, Johnson painstakingly reproduces and weaves together natural sources from vast landscapes, satellite imagery, and stellar footage on the galactic scale, to small, delicate specimens. The body of work in the exhibition will create an immersive environment referencing the careful study of the natural sciences.

Within Forces, the Will and the Weather, each work is drawn line by line in the artists’ studio with several different colored inks. The resulting textures evoke a variety of historical referents, from antique engravings and cartography through early computer graphics, television monitors and contemporary printing technologies. Although process is not the sole content of the work, the fact of the drawings’ laborious origin invites the viewer in for close, very personal study of a quiet, subtle, and intimate set of images. The work’s titles have been crafted by the accomplished Canadian poet Ray Hsu, contributing additional complexity to the already conceptually layered images.

Johnson’s desire to explore the strengths of visual art in combination with methodical processes and scientific precision reflects the nature of her studio practice as a way to achieve a deeper understanding of our environment in as many complimentary ways as possible.

Bethany Johnson was born in 1985 in Indiana. She earned her BA in studio art at Kalamazoo College in 2007, and her MFA in Painting from University of Texas at Austin in 2011. She is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas, and she has also exhibited at, among others, AMOA-Arthouse, Champion Gallery, the Galveston Art Center, and the Creative Research Laboratory. Johnson is the 2011 recipient of the Art League of Austin Scholarship, and has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Denkmalschmiede Höfgen in Germany, and the Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat. Johnson currently lives and works in Austin.

Exhibition runs November 9 – December 21

The MAC is open Wed – Sat 11am – 9 pm

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC