Max graduated in December 2022. We honor him here, with his peers, in the 2023 online symposium.
An Inspired Disease: On Making Art, its Pitfalls, its Consequences, its Rewards
Making artwork is a toiling, cumbersome endeavor which involves repeatedly digging away day after day, hour after hour to produce something. Often, that work is less than evident in the final product: hung up in a gallery space, left to break apart from its origins. I have spent this past year working on an animation of an artist, seen through their hands, during their process of making. The hands are our pathway and sight into their space and craft. This is also an auto-biographical reflection of my own process, namely the struggles involved. Much of the time spent, especially for a large project is less doing work, and more getting to work. Hopefully you can agree that I have done a fair bit of the latter, if this exhibit is anything to go by. In an effort to expose this process further, and bring out the churning, morphing process I have hung up frames I used in the animation.
Behind you lays a work table, a reproduction of my workspace, made into a real work space from repeated visits I will pay it for the next week. You can see my schedule for when I will drop by for an hour and do something. Ideally, that something would be work, but the reality of stepping in and attempting to spill your mind out onto a page day-by-day is much less linear, and more challenging. Some days I can spew out many drawings, others I am lucky to focus long enough to scrawl a single line. If nothing else, I hope it will show what it is like to do work, to make art, and provide some insight that you could not obtain without engaging with the studio space.
Max Johnson ‘22
Advisors: Bridget Murphy Milligan
All images copyright © 2022 Max Johnson. All rights reserved.
Window shot, 2022
Working 3, 2022
Working Table, 2022
An Inspired Disease, animation, 2022