returning

RETURNING, Birdsong Farm, Delhi, NY, 2022

Solo Exhibition 

For Emily Johnston’s inaugural show of drawings, her works on paper and canvas on exhibit span the past six years of art-practice since moving to the Catskill mountains and shifting her chosen medium from photography to graphite and mixed media. 

The contours of the surrounding foothills, where many of the drawings were made, echo throughout the work. Other pieces took form during Emily’s travels to the Pacific Northwest, Mexico, and Nicaragua. This show chronicles the artist’s journey beyond working with the decisive machine of a camera into a more embodied and variable practice. “I wanted to make something with motion in it, with breath in it. I had to relearn to trust my inner knowing, to let it unfurl — beyond clicking the shutter in a momentary flash of recognition — to weave progressively into something ongoing, to take up time and space again.” 

 “Returning” flows and follows Emily’s day-to-day experience through an ever-evolving weather system of personal, social, and emotional realities. Amidst the meditative, abstracted natural imagery, several motifs appear and reappear like talismans or prayers, invoking longing for a source of constancy, an orienting force, or a sense of home, even as everything blooms and promises to fade. 

Emily Johnston is best known for her photographs of abstracted natural elements and ASH DRAWINGS. She has more recently turned her focus to drawing on paper and canvas. She is interested in the intersection of her own internal physical rhythms — breath, heartbeat, nervous system states — with external natural cycles and social disruptions, and the way they emerge in the physical act of mark-making. A founding member of drawing performance group BAND PRACTICE, her work has been exhibited by galleries such as Picture Room, Still House, Ed. Varie, Sad Gallery in Brooklyn, and Galerie Brun L’Eglise in Paris. Her images and writing have been published in the journal Documentum. Emily is an American artist raised in Paris and living in Bovina, New York.