Mary Johnson

Vita, Latin for “life,” has many meanings; it’s the joy for life that grows inside me through creating. The obsession to work drains the life and creativity out of my body. It is the experimentation that has helped me rediscover the desire to keep living. Art is a vital way I express myself and understand my own feelings. The process of making the pieces is just as important as, and in some cases more important than, the finished product. It is this space I build for myself that gives me room to address uncomfortable and hard-to-understand feelings and topics in my artwork. Vita analyzes my relationship with self-expression and perfectionism by exploring the various styles and methods that past and contemporary artists have employed to express themselves. During my time as a college student, and going through many transitions (independence, adulthood, and preparing to start a career) like many of my peers, I have struggled with depression and anxiety. I found that my unhealthy habits of overworking, perfectionism, cynicism, and self-destruction that I plunged into leaked into my artwork–a space that had been bringing me the few moments of joy that kept me moving. Repeatedly, I judged myself and my artwork based on these unhealthy habits and pushed myself to achieve perfection, despite it being an unrealistic aspiration.  

Starting at a young age, I suppressed my energy and emotions, both positive and negative. Eventually, this created the habits and obsessions that led to my perfectionism and workaholism. I grew up with an understanding that my emotional responses were problematic, excessive, and unnecessary, but I never explained what the acceptable responses to positive or negative emotions were. This prevented me from developing an understanding of my own emotions and left me struggling to express them. Through my work,  I examine the effect of how the act of forcing and faking the emotion of joy has negatively affected my mental health and driven me towards a desire for perfection and ultimately into depression. Taking on a project centered on emotions as someone who has a hard time understanding and feeling their own emotions presents its own set of problems. How do I construct a space for myself to understand and feel emotions I’ve been suppressing, in a way that makes them accessible to realize inside of my art? How do I form a body of work that reflects an inauthentic subject authentically?