Artist Lecture & Show: Dion Johnson

Friday, January 12, 2018, 68 p.m.

Posted by: Department of Art and Design

Show dates:  Jan. 12 - March 2, 2018

Artist Lecture: Jan. 12, 6-7pm

Reception: Jan. 12, 7-8pm

Dion Johnson’s paintings combine and explore dynamic opposites: expansiveness and compression, darkness and light. Johnson uses color to evoke the contemporary urban, digital and natural landscape of Southern California to reflect the balance of the harmonic and dissonant qualities in our environment.

 

Johnson is represented by Western Project, Los Angeles, CA and Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, AZ. He has shown at De Buck Gallery, New York; Stephen Stux Gallery, New York; Bill Maynes Gallery, New York; Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles; Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica. Johnson’s work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ART News, Art Forum, The Huffington Post, L.A. Weekly, Art Week, Droste Effect Magazine, Artillery Magazine, and Art Scene. 


​"Johnson is circumstantially a digital painter, but free from the pessimism and the burden of perfection – endowed with an analog attitude, maybe. In Ad Astra (2017), the most recent painting on view here, the composition announces itself as something that could only exist now, in an era in which artists can stretch and condense colors and shapes on computer screens. But the digital is a tool, not a fixation. A compression of warm and cool, straight and curved bands of color coexist, moving in and out of each other, at the center of Ad Astra. The lines are clean, but matter-of-factly so; even if they were painstakingly produced, none read as obsessive. On either side is a spacious expanse of red – on the left, the red fades upwards toward pink and on the right, downward. Because the composition leaves breathing room, the mind feels free to ricochet out, to move back and forth between screen and landscape, surface and atmosphere." - Cathrine Wagley, exhibition essay excerpt 

Location

John and Marilyn Duke Academic Complex, Room 127
701 E. Foothill Blvd.
Azusa, CA 91702
View Map

Link:

Full Calendar

For more information, contact:

Sylvia Johnson
sajohnson@apu.edu
(626) 815-5814