Kysa Johnson

What goes around comes around. This simple aphorism leads one into the complex
worldview at the heart of Kysa Johnson’s beautiful, provocative, and elegant
work. Her blow up 79 is a landscape based on the nineteenth-century American
painter George Innes’s painting of the Delaware River Water Gap. For Innes, like
many of his peers, landscape painting was not merely about pictorial beauty, it
was a vehicle to express the mystical and divine aspects of Nature, a way to celebrate
the New World, and thereby a way to make truly American art.

blow up 79 is also a picture of the molecular structure of the environmental
pollutants propane, methane, acrolein, ethane, hexane, and benzene, all of which
are present in the Delaware River area as we find it today.

The link between these two views—one historical, one contemporary; one
macro, one micro; one rooted in art history, one rooted in environmental history—
is the patterning Johnson discerns in nature and art. Earlier paintings linked
art-historical images of Immaculate Conception (think Mary begetting Jesus) with
scientific examples of Immaculate Conception (think asexually reproducing yeast
or asexually reproducing bacteria). The microscopic image of the latter was patterned
to produce an image of the former. So with microscopic views of benzene
does Johnson build an image of the Delaware.

For Johnson, drawing has always been a means to explore our surroundings
and to try to come to understand the world around us in a deeper way—scientifically,
emotionally, and intellectually. In email correspondence with the author, she
states, “my work has always been about patterns in nature.... the ‘landscapes’ of
the microcosmic and macrocosmic.”

It is this natural affinity to viewing nature, either through a microscope or a
painting, which allows Johnson to see with her naked eye that which we often
miss—the inherent complexity of our ecosystem. By this I mean more than just the
complex natural phenomena at play in the Delaware River; also the psychological,
cultural, and historical overlay which is part of the landscape. We create stories
about nature and they inform our view of landscape. Nature creates stories about
us in the landscape as well, written in methane and propane and there for the
reading, if only you choose to look.

What goes around comes around. Johnson’s large, site-specific wall drawing
in the Leir Atrium is based on the microscopic view of the pollen from trees surrounding
the Museum. Maybe you just inhaled some—God bless you!

Harry Philbrick, Director