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Megan Woodard Johnson at Kim Storage Gallery

There is a joke: When someone who claims to be tasteful is asked what music he listens to at a dinner party, he instinctively answers: “Everyone kind of music.” Those are the titles until you play them Creed, Jefferson Starship, Florida Georgia Line, Maroon 5, etc. At which point they’ll cringe and say, “Oh, but not that stuff.” Then, depending on the integrity of your relationship, they might claim it was an assault on their ears and end the relationship altogether.

A similar problem plagues the art world. What we like to collectively refer to as the “art world” is actually a wild collection of disparate interests all sharing a visual output. Everyone in the world says they love art, but in reality they usually love what reinforces their artistic selves. In fact, there are many groups in the art world that feel less connected to each other than they do to neighboring cultures across different media. Conceptual artists typically identify more with conceptual musicians and filmmakers than with landscape painters or collage artists. That’s because the world is now shaped by point of view rather than media—by ideas rather than things—which is what makes it so difficult to write about any cultural category in 2024.

All of this is especially relevant in Milwaukee, where diversity reigns supreme. In a single afternoon last week, I visited a studio where someone explained to me a video installation about Jeanne Dielman, Laura Mulvey, and the history of the male gaze in relation to feminized objects… and also a beautiful exhibition of formal, collage-based paintings at Megan Woodard Johnson’s new Kim Storage Gallery. Apples and oranges, to be sure. But I like both very much.


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Layered Ephemera

Johnson’s exhibition, aptly titled “Memorable Ordinary,” which runs through August 31, is full of delightful paintings created by layering found ephemera such as newspapers, maps, and stationery, with a final touch of luscious and colorful painting that connects the discovered and the created. If you came to Kim Storage Gallery to question the relationship between text-based media and the art object as a means of subverting contemporary advertising, you should go elsewhere. Maybe even to the bottom of a lake. But if you’re looking for an exploration of how materials, personal history, and form come together in the unique imagination of a single visual adventurer, you’ll be completely satisfied by Johnson’s work.

Johnson’s adventures are given context through the descriptive titles of her works. Summer road trip, Driving through the night gives us a clue as we peer into the formal composition of cut paper, pencil and lush acrylic. A midnight blue section at the bottom right gives way to curved stripes of loose, transparent creamy white, as if they were reflections of lights bouncing off a windshield at 10pm. Or maybe I made this image up, but it really doesn’t matter. The mystery that lives somewhere between the text and the paint and your own imagination is enough. Another larger work in the exhibition, Parade sweetsalso builds on the narrative its title suggests. The sea of ​​brushstroked acrylic at the bottom of the painting gives way to the warm, atmospheric colors above, drawn from such a scene. So sweet and evocative, it almost hurts your cheeks.

Each vignette contributes to an ongoing visual diary of collected and reprocessed experiences. Her images are like broken slide carousels reassembled with a painter’s blurred sense of space and color. Johnson’s work is not driven by metaphors or theories, but by color, form, balance and materiality. The concepts emerge from the wonderful experience of visually engaging with her work.

That this bothers certain parts of the evangelical conceptual art world always annoys me. I often tell the story of a conceptual artist friend of mine who has an irrational argument with another local painter. He thinks the other painter is a bungler when it comes to decorative painting. So I always ask him, “If this guy was your dentist, what would you think of his work?” and my friend agrees that he would be delighted if someone “like him” made beautiful things.

In a world ruled by identity tribes, proximity leads to contempt.

Conceptual artists recoil at beauty. Alt-country fans crumble before Jason Aldean. A foodie might say they don’t like Applebee’s because they don’t want to be associated with unoriginal corporate mush. But let’s be honest, the food tastes good. The restaurant is an assault on sensibility rather than sense. It’s a violation of a viewpoint and identity, not the purest pleasures of human sensuality. And that’s worth paying attention to. The next time you think you don’t like something, ask yourself one question: Does it not make you enjoy feeling, hearing or seeing it, or does it disturb your sense of self when you subject yourself to its effects? That’s a lot of psychophilosophical stuff to go through, but basically it’s the source of most of the resentment we face as a society, and the chance to bring a little more joy into your life.




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