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MICHELLE LEE JOHNSON
Find Michelle’s website and social here: www.michelleleejohnson.com
︎savagewithaconscience
Michelle’s practice exists across sculpture, video, sound, and installation. They are interested in ghosts, scraps, kitsch, and decay—attending to these residues becomes their process to address the materiality of different subjecthoods. Often with a humorous or peculiar affect, their work explores the dialectic generated within the unresolved contradictions experienced between polarities: belonging and alienation; care and neglect; queerness and conformity; mundane and absurd; desire and disgust. They are attempting to contend with feeling and existing across a spectrum through their work.
Michelle thinks through material as subjects that contribute to their conceptual themes. History, identity, and place-making are uncovered by giving attention to what is usually hidden or discarded. How do things or beings become subjects of what they are subjected to? How are objects animated through the systems and conditions that produce them? The body becomes a reoccurring theme in their work as a site of transformation, loss, augmentation, permeability, and flux.
Michelle’s work is curious about how they experience existing inside themselves. In thinking through their own queerness, the body becomes a site of constraint and authority over them, while also allowing for moments to claim, or re-claim, their bodies and expressions. Their current interest plays with pigeons as a subject to think through the mess in searching out one’s flock in public and digital spaces. Alongside an ongoing archive of leaflets, pamphlets, and ephemera collected in/from public spaces, they are interested in why and how people search out for community, care, and belonging. What does collective care and collective neglect look like?
Michelle thinks through material as subjects that contribute to their conceptual themes. History, identity, and place-making are uncovered by giving attention to what is usually hidden or discarded. How do things or beings become subjects of what they are subjected to? How are objects animated through the systems and conditions that produce them? The body becomes a reoccurring theme in their work as a site of transformation, loss, augmentation, permeability, and flux.
Michelle’s work is curious about how they experience existing inside themselves. In thinking through their own queerness, the body becomes a site of constraint and authority over them, while also allowing for moments to claim, or re-claim, their bodies and expressions. Their current interest plays with pigeons as a subject to think through the mess in searching out one’s flock in public and digital spaces. Alongside an ongoing archive of leaflets, pamphlets, and ephemera collected in/from public spaces, they are interested in why and how people search out for community, care, and belonging. What does collective care and collective neglect look like?
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