Keith Johnson Photos
At first glance, maybe it looks like a simple painting made on a textured canvas with a broad brush and a confident hand. Maybe that hand has captured a distant mountain and its foothills, giving birth to a meandering river.
But they’re really just tar-filled cracks in street pavement. And that’s part of the point of “2018,” photographer Keith Johnson’s exhibition of recent work, now running at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville until Feb. 10.
According to the exhibit’s accompanying notes, “Keith Johnson looked out his window one afternoon and had an a‑ha moment. The town was repairing the road, filling in the cracks with tar. ‘That’s a picture!’ Johnson said. He had not picked up his camera since an unfortunate medical setback two years earlier, but in that moment, he was back. A series taken over the course of several months, time continues to be an important theme to his work. However, Johnson also points to a more simple motivation. In the spirit of one of his former professors, Harry Callahan, quoted above, Johnson says his recent works are created from a desire to simply pick up the camera and see what happens.”
That sense of getting back to basics — to getting back to what makes photographs work, and how we look at images — motivates the exhibit and rewards the viewer who explores those questions.
It might be tempting to keep looking for patterns in the stripes of tar that Johnson turns his lens to. This pattern could be an aerial view of a highway interchange.
But Johnson’s photographs encourage us to look past whatever associations we have with his images. It’s fitting that the photographs in the exhibit are untitled. They aren’t about offering a specific interpretation or direction to move in. They’re about the interplay of shapes, of light and shadow, the little shocks of color that fallen leaves can provide.
In that mode, Johnson’s eye is able to unify a stretch of city pavement and what could be a koi pond in a botanical garden. The fallen leaves and bright fish provide the bursts of yellow and orange, the water and the pavement the varying surface, the trees the reflections of sun and shade. The subjects are completely different, but our eyes, our brains, find the similarities.
A series of photo grids pushes the idea further. There are grids of pictures of waves on the water, of flowers emerging from the darkness, and this vivid grid of photographs of what turns out to be a pile of locks. The way Johnson has put the photographs together, though, it could be many, many things: a crowd viewed from a distance, a mountain of recycling materials, or an up-close photograph of the texture of a surface that appears smooth to the naked eye. That it’s really a pile of hardware is beside the point. Under Johnson’s eye they become flashes of metal and accompanying darkness, bits of color here and there, an undulating texture.
It has a simple yet profound statement to make about how we see, and how we make sense of what we see. We recognize faces and places, the people we love and the places we live. We revel in seeing things we haven’t seen before when we travel. But really, it’s all just light hitting our eyeballs. That’s it. We can be manipulated by that if we’re not cognizant of it. We can read too much into the things we see, too, effectively manipulating ourselves. Even when we do it responsibly, we’re just grafting meaning onto the visual information our eyes give us. In the end, all we’re really seeing is colors.
So when we turn to one of the more obviously readable and startlingly unseasonal photographs in Johnson’s exhibition, we look at it with fresh eyes. Yes: It’s a sprinkler in a grassy backyard on a sunny day. But look again and the subject isn’t necessarily the sprinkler or the hose, or the houses nearby, or even the flowers adorning the border of the image in the foreground. It could be the water in the air, and the way it blends with and reflects the light moving through it, drawing stripes in space. It twists and turns like a ghost. If we blinked, we might miss it.
“2018” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Feb. 10. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
