Safe Keeping

Johnson’s practice deals intrinsically with notions of anthropogenic environmental issues: in particular, matters of material consumption and the resulting pollution, climate impacts, and landfill waste. In line with the spirit of the exhibition title, the works presented here embody both anxiety and hope – alarm alongside a meditative, poetic calm. In this way, these works grapple with the dual experiences of grief and joy in nature familiar to any informed lover of the natural world at this moment deep in the Anthropocene.

Reminiscent of geologic formations, and appearing perhaps at home within a cabinet of natural curiosities, the intimate sculptures of Safe Keeping offer a multi-layered meditation on deep time, material metamorphosis, and the anthropogenic landscaping of landfills, quarries, and road cuts.

These works take the form of stratified plinths of contrasting materials that are reminiscent of geological core samples, landfill strata, archival stacks and material storage. While the layered compositions strongly evoke land formations and geologic processes, all of the materials are discarded or found waste items, thereby also addressing notions of anthropogenic waste and its entombment. The waste materials are both reclaimed from the artist’s personal waste stream, as well as recovered from the landscape during regular litter removal excursions.

These dimensional works are first assembled and composed by cutting and stacking collected waste materials, including plastics, paper, aluminium, fabric, foam, cardboard and wood. Densely bound together with pressure by a hidden, internal armature of screws and bolts, the final sculptural forms are then trimmed and sanded to a smooth polish.

The works’ satin surfaces evoke the hand-worn patina of worry stones, and the modest scale suggests the intimacy of a beloved keepsake or archived natural specimen. Despite their commonplace and otherwise abject component materials, the final results are mysterious and entrancing: the weighty sculptures reveal themselves slowly, asking for close examination and gradual discovery of their origins.

As a quietly urgent meditation on the damage of material consumption on our natural environment, the works of Safe Keeping offer a new alchemical life to otherwise discarded litter. This body of work addresses the artist’s growing concern around anthropogenic environmental degradation, and serves as a holistic practice that functions simultaneously as art-making and act of service, aesthetic inquiry and humble act of contrition and environmental repair. Safe Keeping is an anxious, doting, necessarily inconclusive meditation on the Earth, on our place on it, and on our collective futures.

Bethany Johnson is an artist currently living in Austin, Texas; working in drawing, collage and sculpture.

Johnson received her BA in Studio Art from the Kalamazoo College in 2007 and MFA in Painting at the University of Texas in 2011. Her work is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, where her fourth solo exhibition was presented in December 2020. Johnson’s artwork has been featured in New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, and HuffPost, among others, and she has held residencies at Denkmalschmiede Höfgen in Grimma, Germany, Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin, and Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency.