Jay Mark Johnson
Cover for Issue 339
Los Angeles
Issue 339 August 25, 2009
Jay Mark Johnson produces photographic images that challenge the norms of perception. Employing a process that is distinct from conventional photography, he creates works that merge the recording of space and time into a single, linear "spacetime" continuum. The resulting photographs are akin to both seismographs and electrocardiograms in that, as timelines, they begin on the left and end on the right.

The artist approaches this work as an open-ended exploration into the possibilities for timeline photography. He equates his visual experimentation to stepping "through the looking glass" with Alice. In this parallel world of shifted perceptions, the ground rules are changed. Horizontal space is obliterated, shadows are crisscrossed, directional movement is confounded. Individuals appear isolated from the spaces they inhabit, and the relative speed of an object causes its expansion or contraction. Though the images are true photographs, they challenge the viewer’s effort to decode them.

Art historian Christopher Finch writes, "Since he began his studies in 2005, Johnson has already uncovered many possibilities, demonstrating that the process can be employed to record a wide variety of subjects/events. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of his photography is that it tugs photography away from the gravitational pull of Euclidean documentation--which has dominated the field since its beginnings--and prods it towards new and ambitious aesthetic and intellectual goals"

Born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida, Jay Mark Johnson holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Tulane University. He studied at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (NYC) and UCLA where he focused on Linguistic Anthropology and Biological Anthropology. Works of Johnson are in the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Collection Frederick R. Weisman, the Langen Foundation, Hombroich Germany, and the collection of Alison and Peter W. Klein, Museum Kunstwerk, Eberdingen. He lives and works in Venice, California.

View our listing on Jay Mark Johnson’s current exhibition SPACETIME at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills.

For more images and information on past, current, and upcoming exhibitions, please visit the artist’s representing galleries: ACE Gallery and Galerie Deschler, Berlin.

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