Often times it’s difficult to determine the right course of action when expressing yourself artistically. You have so much that rides on the outcome, if your attempt is to express yourself viscerally. Your hopes, your vision, and more difficultly, you become your first and largest hurdle. Diving deep into yourself, your soul, or however else you choose to label your fuel, you face many complex mechanisms.
Unfortunately, a lot of the things we try to perform mechanically elude us to a status quo and all together obscures this gut fueled channeling of untamed expression. Alternatively we disingenuously represent originality in a calibrated fumble or dance around the subjects already set in place by popular culture. You may succeed in avoiding the plagiarist stigma, in a set stage where one would persecute visceral originality to a life of purgatory in exchange for short-term satisfaction, ungrounded human reverence. The very same psycho-mechanisms that force fish to school, or wildebeest to stampede in enormous masses as to not step out into the harsh heart of reality.
Having said that, these are the very same reasons we idolize those who stray away from the crowd and endure scrutiny, and bigotry. Ultimately, risking a trip into the unknown darkness of night, or being ostracized by your peers, you shatter the constructs of definition that can sometimes suffocate expression. The night is porous, and it needs movement, it needs effort to sweat truth. The night secretion is a spew of reality. The squeezing begins at the base of you, and it may take form in color or shape.
Such as that of my drawing “Insomnia”, where an augmented reality represents the deeply disturbing and often revealing dangers of yourself and your world, supported by sleep deprivation and the wild course imagination can take in the limitless night. I placed color that felt neutral or rather familiar to evoke some sort of nostalgia while balancing their distance to emphasize displacement. Placed off center is the text, continuing the theme of displacement, through the falling loop structure of the typeface.
The difficulty of expression simmered when I embraced the enigmatic nature of night by taking on subjects that are in conjunction with night. I built off of the many sub themes by making an attempt to avoid fearing the process of breaking away into the night, or rather the unknown.
Joshua Johnson
