merritt johnson

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My work is a challenge to the right of force to control (by one of an other).

Everything extant is or can be made other (if all vantage points are considered).

To be one, is to be a loosely cobbled together amalgamation of many (labeled as one by a ruling minority to maintain control).

All of us (and I refer to us in the broadest sense stretching beyond the human) are subjected to some division- to material limitation, clumsiness of being, and meanness of survival. 
Any of these can be used to manifest control under the guise of protection from what is feared.  

Participation or agreement in the conditions and construction of division is not considered necessary by one of the other, yet the other will be subject to the conditions of division determined by one.

Even clouds are shot out of the sky.  It’s fitting they would hurl themselves to the ground, disguising themselves to avoid subjection to what is down here.

I collapse the disjointedness of others/us/them into hybrids; stand-ins for things as they are, and might be: 

pressing the invisible into tangibility, into competition with the concrete; camouflaging the subject with paint, constructing replicas of what might/is.

The Clouds and Buffalo are only alike in their otherness to us, through our otherness to them.

Balanced on the precariousness of inclusion, my works undermine justness of violence by direction.
Like us, they are materially dependent, sliding out of imagined possibility and resistance.

 

 

 

 

Merritt Johnson

2011

merrittj@ecuad.ca
© 2010, merritt johnson. all rights reserved