Sue Johnson, "Sprout and Dog Casserole"
From The Incredible Edibles (Black Set)
Slip-cast vitreous china
6.5 x 9.75 x 3.25”
2007
In the series, The Incredible Edibles, Nature is presented as innocent in a world of consumption, a world in which we humans rarely know the exact origin of the food we eat, and certainly don’t expect our meals to stare back at us from the plate. Out of scale and context, wild animals present themselves as fanciful and disquieting meals. A plate of pork & beans literally has a miniature pig amongst the beans, and on TV dinner trays readymade convenience meals offer up lamb stew and venison with gravy. In both cases, the meal is still in whole animal form, albeit in miniature, taken from life casts of plastic toys and ceramic figurines. While these works comment on the ubiquitous anthropomorphic ‘spokes-animal’ who is happy to be consumed - so often pictured on cereal boxes for example - these works also suggest a darker, more covert world of genetically modified foods and human attempts to create an artificial - more humanized - Nature.
These ceramic sculptures find their foundational inspiration in the rich history of functional and decorative ceramics that incorporate Nature’s creatures into the overall form. Platters by Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) present living tableaus of wild nature in relief on the dinner plate, and in many cultures and across time there are a wide array of examples of soup tureens, tea and coffee pots and other serving pieces made in the shape of vegetables and animals. Revealing a keen sense of irony, the history of ceramics shows evidence of artists using the functional form of the dinner service to comment on the complicated relationship between humans and food, and by extension the natural world. The contemporary expansion of genetically modified nature and 20th-century popular culture is brought into focus in the series title itself, The Incredible Edibles. First popular with children in the 1960’s, the edible version of Creepy Crawlers, Incredible Edibles was a quasi-scientific toy sold by Mattel with which kids could make zoological-shaped rubbery candy by pouring edible Gobble De-Goop into metal cooking molds and baking them in a miniature oven. Johnson created The Incredible Edibles series during a residency in the Arts/Industry program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center that takes place in the Kohler Company factory in Kohler, WI.
Each sculpture was created in one of two variations. The first version is hand-painted in naturalistic but somewhat unappetizing colors to approximate plastic fake food, and the second version is a black monochrome that draws parallels to elaborate, inedible and decorative urns, vases, and centerpieces so much a part of the setting created for the fine dining experience in history.
STATEMENT
Through my mixed-media installation projects, paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, found objects and artist books, I look at the material culture of the past as a way of understanding what has come into being in our contemporary times. Works are site-specific when collaborating with museum and library collections, and at other times projects mine the archive of my own collection of objects and magazines directed to the female consumer. Early career works showcased the human desire for control over nature by presenting alternate visual narratives in the form of new-fashioned cabinet of curiosities told from a feminist perspective. This led to my current focus on the intersecting realms of industrial progress, technology, and domesticity, and the resulting mechanicalization and dehumanization of women in a modern world that embraces a culture of convenience, efficiency and planned obsolescence. Like the collecting ethos of Wunderkammers of old, the porous boundaries between the so-called artificial and natural, the animate and inanimate, draws all my work together while also eluding easy categorization.
BIO
Sue Johnson (American, born San Francisco, CA) is an internationally exhibited artist who grew up in California and New Jersey. She earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University. Often invited by museums and university galleries to develop research-based exhibition and intervention projects, she has collaborated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, and the American Philosophical Society Museum. Johnson has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Maryland State Arts Council, and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Visual Art Fellowship. Her work has been the subject of over forty one-person exhibitions at venues that include the Tweed Museum of Art, Jan Cicero Gallery, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Hollins University, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Pitt Rivers Museum, Midwest Museum of American Art, Swarthmore College, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, University of Memphis, and University of Richmond Museums. Selected residency fellowships include the Arts/Industry Program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Art Omi, Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, I-Park Foundation, Jentel Foundation, CAMAC/Centre D'Art Marnay Art Centre, and library research residencies at the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Her work is in numerous public collections and exhibition reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Art Examiner, Partisan Review and Art Papers. She is currently a Professor of Art in the Department of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she has served as Department Chair, Coordinator of the Environmental Studies Program and the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Arts.
From The Incredible Edibles (Black Set)
Slip-cast vitreous china
6.5 x 9.75 x 3.25”
2007
In the series, The Incredible Edibles, Nature is presented as innocent in a world of consumption, a world in which we humans rarely know the exact origin of the food we eat, and certainly don’t expect our meals to stare back at us from the plate. Out of scale and context, wild animals present themselves as fanciful and disquieting meals. A plate of pork & beans literally has a miniature pig amongst the beans, and on TV dinner trays readymade convenience meals offer up lamb stew and venison with gravy. In both cases, the meal is still in whole animal form, albeit in miniature, taken from life casts of plastic toys and ceramic figurines. While these works comment on the ubiquitous anthropomorphic ‘spokes-animal’ who is happy to be consumed - so often pictured on cereal boxes for example - these works also suggest a darker, more covert world of genetically modified foods and human attempts to create an artificial - more humanized - Nature.
These ceramic sculptures find their foundational inspiration in the rich history of functional and decorative ceramics that incorporate Nature’s creatures into the overall form. Platters by Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) present living tableaus of wild nature in relief on the dinner plate, and in many cultures and across time there are a wide array of examples of soup tureens, tea and coffee pots and other serving pieces made in the shape of vegetables and animals. Revealing a keen sense of irony, the history of ceramics shows evidence of artists using the functional form of the dinner service to comment on the complicated relationship between humans and food, and by extension the natural world. The contemporary expansion of genetically modified nature and 20th-century popular culture is brought into focus in the series title itself, The Incredible Edibles. First popular with children in the 1960’s, the edible version of Creepy Crawlers, Incredible Edibles was a quasi-scientific toy sold by Mattel with which kids could make zoological-shaped rubbery candy by pouring edible Gobble De-Goop into metal cooking molds and baking them in a miniature oven. Johnson created The Incredible Edibles series during a residency in the Arts/Industry program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center that takes place in the Kohler Company factory in Kohler, WI.
Each sculpture was created in one of two variations. The first version is hand-painted in naturalistic but somewhat unappetizing colors to approximate plastic fake food, and the second version is a black monochrome that draws parallels to elaborate, inedible and decorative urns, vases, and centerpieces so much a part of the setting created for the fine dining experience in history.
STATEMENT
Through my mixed-media installation projects, paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, found objects and artist books, I look at the material culture of the past as a way of understanding what has come into being in our contemporary times. Works are site-specific when collaborating with museum and library collections, and at other times projects mine the archive of my own collection of objects and magazines directed to the female consumer. Early career works showcased the human desire for control over nature by presenting alternate visual narratives in the form of new-fashioned cabinet of curiosities told from a feminist perspective. This led to my current focus on the intersecting realms of industrial progress, technology, and domesticity, and the resulting mechanicalization and dehumanization of women in a modern world that embraces a culture of convenience, efficiency and planned obsolescence. Like the collecting ethos of Wunderkammers of old, the porous boundaries between the so-called artificial and natural, the animate and inanimate, draws all my work together while also eluding easy categorization.
BIO
Sue Johnson (American, born San Francisco, CA) is an internationally exhibited artist who grew up in California and New Jersey. She earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University. Often invited by museums and university galleries to develop research-based exhibition and intervention projects, she has collaborated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, and the American Philosophical Society Museum. Johnson has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Maryland State Arts Council, and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Visual Art Fellowship. Her work has been the subject of over forty one-person exhibitions at venues that include the Tweed Museum of Art, Jan Cicero Gallery, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Hollins University, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Pitt Rivers Museum, Midwest Museum of American Art, Swarthmore College, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, University of Memphis, and University of Richmond Museums. Selected residency fellowships include the Arts/Industry Program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Art Omi, Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, I-Park Foundation, Jentel Foundation, CAMAC/Centre D'Art Marnay Art Centre, and library research residencies at the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Her work is in numerous public collections and exhibition reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Art Examiner, Partisan Review and Art Papers. She is currently a Professor of Art in the Department of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she has served as Department Chair, Coordinator of the Environmental Studies Program and the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Arts.
From The Incredible Edibles (Black Set)
Slip-cast vitreous china
6.5 x 9.75 x 3.25”
2007
In the series, The Incredible Edibles, Nature is presented as innocent in a world of consumption, a world in which we humans rarely know the exact origin of the food we eat, and certainly don’t expect our meals to stare back at us from the plate. Out of scale and context, wild animals present themselves as fanciful and disquieting meals. A plate of pork & beans literally has a miniature pig amongst the beans, and on TV dinner trays readymade convenience meals offer up lamb stew and venison with gravy. In both cases, the meal is still in whole animal form, albeit in miniature, taken from life casts of plastic toys and ceramic figurines. While these works comment on the ubiquitous anthropomorphic ‘spokes-animal’ who is happy to be consumed - so often pictured on cereal boxes for example - these works also suggest a darker, more covert world of genetically modified foods and human attempts to create an artificial - more humanized - Nature.
These ceramic sculptures find their foundational inspiration in the rich history of functional and decorative ceramics that incorporate Nature’s creatures into the overall form. Platters by Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) present living tableaus of wild nature in relief on the dinner plate, and in many cultures and across time there are a wide array of examples of soup tureens, tea and coffee pots and other serving pieces made in the shape of vegetables and animals. Revealing a keen sense of irony, the history of ceramics shows evidence of artists using the functional form of the dinner service to comment on the complicated relationship between humans and food, and by extension the natural world. The contemporary expansion of genetically modified nature and 20th-century popular culture is brought into focus in the series title itself, The Incredible Edibles. First popular with children in the 1960’s, the edible version of Creepy Crawlers, Incredible Edibles was a quasi-scientific toy sold by Mattel with which kids could make zoological-shaped rubbery candy by pouring edible Gobble De-Goop into metal cooking molds and baking them in a miniature oven. Johnson created The Incredible Edibles series during a residency in the Arts/Industry program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center that takes place in the Kohler Company factory in Kohler, WI.
Each sculpture was created in one of two variations. The first version is hand-painted in naturalistic but somewhat unappetizing colors to approximate plastic fake food, and the second version is a black monochrome that draws parallels to elaborate, inedible and decorative urns, vases, and centerpieces so much a part of the setting created for the fine dining experience in history.
STATEMENT
Through my mixed-media installation projects, paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, found objects and artist books, I look at the material culture of the past as a way of understanding what has come into being in our contemporary times. Works are site-specific when collaborating with museum and library collections, and at other times projects mine the archive of my own collection of objects and magazines directed to the female consumer. Early career works showcased the human desire for control over nature by presenting alternate visual narratives in the form of new-fashioned cabinet of curiosities told from a feminist perspective. This led to my current focus on the intersecting realms of industrial progress, technology, and domesticity, and the resulting mechanicalization and dehumanization of women in a modern world that embraces a culture of convenience, efficiency and planned obsolescence. Like the collecting ethos of Wunderkammers of old, the porous boundaries between the so-called artificial and natural, the animate and inanimate, draws all my work together while also eluding easy categorization.
BIO
Sue Johnson (American, born San Francisco, CA) is an internationally exhibited artist who grew up in California and New Jersey. She earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University. Often invited by museums and university galleries to develop research-based exhibition and intervention projects, she has collaborated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, and the American Philosophical Society Museum. Johnson has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Maryland State Arts Council, and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Visual Art Fellowship. Her work has been the subject of over forty one-person exhibitions at venues that include the Tweed Museum of Art, Jan Cicero Gallery, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Hollins University, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Pitt Rivers Museum, Midwest Museum of American Art, Swarthmore College, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, University of Memphis, and University of Richmond Museums. Selected residency fellowships include the Arts/Industry Program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Art Omi, Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, I-Park Foundation, Jentel Foundation, CAMAC/Centre D'Art Marnay Art Centre, and library research residencies at the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Her work is in numerous public collections and exhibition reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Art Examiner, Partisan Review and Art Papers. She is currently a Professor of Art in the Department of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she has served as Department Chair, Coordinator of the Environmental Studies Program and the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Arts.