Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/730395
These works lead to Escapist Collages, paintings on colored tile layered with photo decals of tropical imagery, as if suggesting a way out. "Constant escape is an underlying narrative" in this series, Johnson says, pointing out other decals of Harriet Tubman and the Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, who claimed he came from Saturn. "I don't think anyone is without wanting to escape, even Donald Trump supporters." Next come the Falling Men: wall assemblages that transform Johnson's signature materials of white tile, oak floorboards, mirror shards and black soap and wax splatters into upside-down stick figures who seem to fall through space. "There's a quietness to these that's almost a respite," Johnson says. "Like the gift of death Derrida talks about." Even in that busy studio, with assistants sawing and hammering in the background, the robotic figure with a potted fern planted where its pubic hair should be, conveys a weirdly visceral sensation. At the show's heart stands Antoine's Organ, Johnson's first installation to incorporate live music. Inside its plant-laden grid is a piano and a musician, Antoine Baldwin, who plays his own jazz several hours a day. No doubt it's because of this live soundtrack—added to the overarching themes of escape, redemption and soaring new heights—that the show is called "Fly Away," after the 1929 gospel standard "I'll Fly Away." "Rashid is someone who is always experimenting in the studio and trying to innovate," says Cristopher Canizares, senior director at Hauser & Wirth. "But I can't think of a moment when he has debuted so many new series and taken such innovative strides all at one time." Yet another such moment may soon be on the way: this show is a warm-up for Johnson's upcoming museum exhibition, opening in February at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Oddly enough, this massive show found its roots in Johnson's Anxious Men show at the Drawing Center last fall, one of the more intimate exhibitions of his career. The series at its heart was sparked when curator Claire Gibson, who "had admired Rashid's work for a long time," as she recalls, asked him to consider "the use of the drawn gesture that unified all the different bodies of his work." Johnson was soon marking individual faces into the black soap and wax he uses to make murky black abstractions. (He calls this mixture "cosmic slop," after the famous Funkadelic song.) Yet as anxiety began mounting in the world, with "global immigration issues, attacks on America, and attacks within America by police on young black men," Johnson says, the notion of exploring just his own anxiety seemed inadequate, and he began drawing multiple anxious faces instead. "I was coming to the realization that my anxiety was not mine exclusively," he says. "It also had something to do with fatherhood." His son, Julius, just turned five, and Johnson is impassioned when speaking of the strong influence that he and his wife, artist Sheree Hovsepian, have had on his life and work. "When something happens to me, it happens to my family—to the human family," he says. "Thinking more responsibly about all of us—that happens with maturity." As anxiety began mounting in the world, with "global immigration issues, attacks on America and attacks within America by police on young black men," Johnson says, the notion of exploring just his own anxiety seemed inadequate, and he began drawing multiple anxious faces instead. 174 culturedmag.com