EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL AND I AM SO SAD: Amy Johnson’s Seasons Quartet
Sarah Sentilles
Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, spoke to her, seduced her with sapphire blue, the pull so strong, she packed up her life and moved north north north, so she could see that color, get close to that color. With her, she brought a dress, a gown she’d stitched and dyed and silkscreened and printed, blue and green and gold and rust and white, and she wore it and walked on a glacier, the landscape harsh and cold and disappearing.
For Amy Johnson, art and life are the same thing. “There is no distinction,” she told me. I understood what she meant when I visited her home in Boise. The front yard bloomed with sunflowers and echinacea and rocky mountain bee plant. There was a soundtrack of bees. Inside, art hung on every wall. She served me coffee in a mug she made, a lunch of basil and tomatoes harvested from her raised bed gardens, where she also grows marigolds that she uses to bundle dye fabric. She’s transformed her home into a series of studios – a room for drying flowers, a room for throwing clay, a room for sewing and dyeing and screen printing. There is no place where art is not made.
Seasons Quartet brings together four discrete bodies of work made over twelve years. All four are a kind of self-portraiture – a lone and costumed figure in gorgeous and strange landscapes, mythic. We see her on a glacier, in a lake, in woods, in snow, in fields, on lava flows. Bringing together this many years of work in one show is an occasion to look back at decades of artmaking and see the threads pulled through.
Self-portraiture is not new to Johnson; she made self-portraits as an undergraduate. In one series, she wears a blonde wig and black boots and a green feather boa. She leans against a house, sits at a bar, sits in a church, walks along a highway. Johnson’s ceramics professor, Scott Chamberlain, told her, “If you keep working like this, you will make beautiful things.” That changed her life; she kept working. And she makes beautiful things, even when the content is devastating. “My job, what I have always said that I wanted to do as an artist, was to make these dark subjects beautiful,” Johnson told me. “Then it becomes accessible . . . That’s part of the seduction: getting people to look, drawing them in.”
Johnson’s images do beguile; they capture. Talking with her, I thought of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. In that slim book, Scarry wrestles with ethical criticisms of beauty and reclaims it as essential for bringing into being a more just world. “Beauty is lifesaving,” Elaine Scarry writes. She continues, “[B]eautiful things . . . always carry greetings from other worlds within them.” I hear greetings from other worlds in Johnson’s work. I see feathers in the snow, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Ripples in water reaching out and out. Leaves fluttering in sunlight. Invitations to wonder, imagine, repair.
Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, and she wove a crown of sticks, a skirt of sticks and wheat, put her bare feet in red skis, and traveled on moss, through woods, aspen leaves quaking, into a lake, turning, spinning in that water, the surface doubling her, doubling sky and cloud, and then she gathered dead grasses and dried flowers, gathered apples, bruised and rotting, asking what might be harvested, asking what might be saved.
Johnson has long explored fairy tales and the domestic, specifically the wedding industry and the stories we’re sold about what relationships look like, about what we should want and buy and be. She photographed bridesmaid dresses. She cast 100 miniature wedding dresses using Jello molds and created a big pink cake. What do these fantasy objects promise? We are meant to aspire to the visions offered by fairy tales and social media and advertising, yet at the center, danger, pricked fingers, poisoned apples, trick mirrors. Fairy tales lure. They disappoint. They warn about the risks of being a woman in the world.
Johnson went to graduate school for ceramics, but while there, she stopped using clay. She has returned to it, throwing pots and mugs and vases and cups of all shapes and sizes. One table in her studio is lined with bright blue creations. In some SEASONS QUARTET images, Johnson herself becomes the sculpture, her skin smeared with clay. She is what her professor and mentor Doug Jeck called a “human object.”
Looking at Johnson’s work requires heightened attention. The pacing in the moving images is slow. There is an emphasis on detail, on texture. Hands touch velvet, touch snow, touch a wreath of twigs, pull grasses, hold feathers and release them into the wind. Careful looking can be an antidote to the ways we mis-see each other and the world. Mystery can slow us down.
And so can beauty. According to Scarry, beauty exerts pressure on us that is “distributional.” What she means is that if we give our attention to a beautiful person or object, then “this heightened attention is voluntarily extended out to other persons and things.” In other words, if it’s possible to look carefully at something beautiful – a feather, a leaf, a person, a bone, a photograph – then, perhaps, we can learn to look carefully at everything, at everyone. Scarry writes, “It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.”
Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, and she wore feathers in her hair and around her neck, a Willow Ptarmigin, skilled at camouflage, well suited to brutal cold, and with her hands she dug through snow, burrowed, until she was two, not alone, connected, grey light, golden grasses, faces hidden then revealed then hidden again, feathers caught on sticks in snow, in wind. What is being uncovered? What is being buried? What might she build?
“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering,” Scarry writes. She engages Simone Weil, who writes that beauty requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position at the center.’” It’s not that we realize we no longer stand at the center of our own world, Scarry insists; rather, we realize that “we never stood there.” It was an illusion all along. Johnson knows this. There is no center in “The Space Between.” The split-screen work exists in the corner, bent, everything doubled.
Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, and she laid on that deep black, danced on that deep black, made a circle of marigolds, small flames in the darkness, remembering the red-hot flow, remembering change, a requiem for all that burns. She throws a bouquet, a gift, an offering. She gathers rough stones. Like the land, she is a moving image. Like the land, she is in mourning. Like the land, she becomes something new and ancient, broken and healed, vanishing and eternal.
Is the mythic being who appears in all four bodies of work at home in these desolate landscapes? Is she afraid? Is she mourning? Protecting? Where has she been? Where is she going? Looking at her, watching her, I have the sense that she has walked out of the fairy tale, released herself from its hold, and is now disoriented, wondering what can be salvaged on this planet that has been so ravaged, that is heating, melting, flooding, burning. These works are an elegy, I think, for the world as we’ve known it, for the earth, for the disappearing beings we share this planet with, and for ourselves.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, a book that claims grief as sacred and political, Francis Weller writes that ritual is an embodied process that breaks us open to a more enchanted world, that repairs, and that invites denied and forgotten parts of ourselves to return. It is a call and response, Weller writes, between the individual, the community, and the land. In Seasons Quartet, Johnson engages in this call and response, in this ritual work, tending, listening, gathering, witnessing, grieving. She is in relationship with the land, giving her attention, her devotion. Something, it seems, is being asked of her – and of her viewers. Perhaps, in Elaine Scarry’s words from On Beauty and Being Just, what is being asked is to attend “to the aliveness . . . of our world, and [enter] into its protection.”
Looking at Johnson’s magnificent still and moving images, I feel a mixture of hope and despair, of urgency and patience, of grief and love. “Adrift,” a poem by Mark Nepo, keeps returning to me as I consider her work. Nepo opens the poem with this line: “Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.” He writes of the heart’s “duet of wonder and grief”: light, a delicate fern, birds that move from branch to branch, and our aches for everything and everyone who is gone. The last few lines echo for me:
In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
What might art make possible? How might art – both its making and its viewing – help us be better citizens of the world in all its terror and delights? How might we learn from art how to remember what can’t be taken away? How might we learn to honor all we’ve lost?