Matthew Johnson

Queer culture in the post internet age is full of purposeful contradictions. Over the last couple years, I've been exploring ways of making visual metaphors for how it feels to be a part of a gay world that feels less and less tangible everyday. More focus and energy is places on gay cruising apps, while in person events feel few and far between. Sex still feels central to the community but in ways talks about or visually consumed than practiced. My challenge in attempting to translate this through to some sort of aesthetic was in figuring out what materials or images clearly represent these mix of contexts and how to smash them all together in a way that illustrated the discovery process of the queer landscape.

Using a mixture of painting language and wall oriented installation, my work is pursuing the ways that these worlds feel two dimensional yet rich in depth. I've taken inspiration from Sarah Sze, David Altmejd, and Robert Rauschenberg to play with the connections between disparate contexts, objects, and appropriated images of pornography to play with the idea that the queer community currently exists in a kind of maximalist liminal space. The wonder experienced by traversing this landscape gives way to a darker less stabilized structure that can make its participants feel lost and less secure in their own identity. In many ways this loss of ego is the freedom we've been searching for.

     

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