Megan Woodard Johnson at Kim Storage Gallery

Expand

Photo via Kim Storage Gallery

‘An Exceptionally Fun Party’ by Megan Woodard Johnson

‘An Exceptionally Fun Party’ by Megan Woodard Johnson

There’s a joke that when anyone claiming to be tasteful is asked what music they listen to at a dinner party, they instinctively say “Every kind of music.” Which tracks until you drop some Creed, Jefferson Starship, Florida Georgia Line, Maroon 5, etc. on them. At which point they’ll cringe and say, “Oh but not that stuff.” Then, depending on the integrity of your relationship, they might claim an assault on their ears and end the union altogether. 

A similar issue plagues the art world. What we like to collectively label an “art world” is actually a wild set of divergent interests all sharing a visual result. Everyone in the world says they love art, but in fact they usually love what reinforces their art selves. There are in fact many groups in the art world who feel less affiliated with each other than they do to adjacent cultures across media. Conceptual artists usually identify more with conceptual musicians and film makers than they do with landscape painters or collage artists. This is because the world now is being shaped by point of view rather than media–ideas rather than stuff–which is what makes writing about any category of culture in 2024 so difficult. 

All of this is especially relevant in Milwaukee where diversity prevails. In a single afternoon last week I went on a studio visit where someone explained a video installation in relation to Jeanne Dielman, Laura Mulvey, and the history of the male gaze as it relates to feminized objects … and also a beautiful show of formal collage-based paintings at the new Kim Storage Gallery by Megan Woodard Johnson. Apples and oranges, for sure. But I happen to enjoy both apples and oranges tremendously. 

Layered Ephemera

Johnson’s show, titled appropriately, “Memorable Ordinary,” running through August 31, is filled with delightful paintings made by layering found ephemera such as newspapers, maps, and stationery, with a finishing flourish of juicy and colorful painterliness that binds the discovered and the created together. If you came into Kim Storage Gallery looking to interrogate the relationship between text-based media and the art object as a means of subverting contemporary advertising, you should go somewhere else. Maybe to the bottom of a lake, actually. But if you’re looking for an exploration of how materials, personal history, and form come together within the unique imagination of a single visual adventurer, Johnson’s work will satisfy you thoroughly. 

Expand

Photo via Kim Storage Gallery

'Summer Road Trip: License Plate Game’ by Megan Woodard Johnson

'Summer Road Trip: License Plate Game’ by Megan Woodard Johnson

Johnson’s adventures are given context by the descriptive titles of her work. Summer Road Trip, Driving Through the Night tips us off as we peer into the formal composition of cut paper, pencil, and luscious acrylic media. A midnight blue section in the lower right yields to sweeping streaks of loose transparent creamy whites as if they were reflections of lights skipping off a windshield at 10pm. Or maybe I invented that image, but it really doesn’t matter. The mystery living between somewhere within the text and the color and your own imagination is enough. Another larger work in the show, Parade Candy, also builds on the narrative suggested in its title. The candy apple sea of brushy acrylic at the bottom of the paintings yields to the warm atmospheric colors above from such a scene. So sweet and evocative it almost makes your cheeks hurt. 

Each vignette contributes to a running visual diary of collected and reprocessed experience. Her paintings are like shattered slide carousels put back together with a painter’s washy sense of space and color. Johnson’s work doesn’t lead with metaphor or theory; it leads with color, form, balance, and materiality. The concepts come after the perfectly wonderful experience of engaging her work on visual terms. 

That this tends to bother certain portions of the evangelical conceptual art world always chaps me. I often tell a story about a conceptual artist friend who has an irrational beef with another local painter. He thinks the other painter is a hack for making decorative paintings. So I always ask him, “If that guy was your dentist, what would you think of his work?” and my friend agrees that he would be pleased that someone “like that” was making beautiful things. 

In a world governed by identity tribes, proximity breeds contempt. 

Conceptual artists cringe in the face of beauty. Alt country fans crumble in front of Jason Aldean. A foodie might say they don’t like Applebee’s because they don’t want to be associated with unoriginal corporate pablum. But let’s face it, food tastes good. The restaurant is an assault on a sensibility rather than a sense. It’s a trespass against a point of view and an identity, not on the rawest pleasures of human sensuality. Which is something to pay attention to. Next time you think you don’t like something, ask yourself a question: do you not enjoy feeling, hearing, or seeing it, or does opening up to its effects disturb your sense of who you are? It’s a lot of psycho-philosophical stuff to sift through, but at the bottom of it is the source of most of the rancor we face as a society, and chance to have a little more pleasure in your life.