Elizabeth Johnson

My oil paintings join unrelated subjects in the manner of Surrealism. I call this work "anti-story" because it confounds rational thinking, creates mysteries, and thwarts the mental mechanism that makes sense of the world through narrative. I depict photographs and imagined paintings as if they occupy space, distorting or wrapping images on objects like wallpaper, using Photoshop as a tool and hand-built forms as models . To me, photographs, figure drawings, and geometric shapes have lives of their own apart from the tyranny of meaning, and I love to look not only at combinations of objects and images that have no obvious reason for appearing together, but also at those with no preexisting, well-worn associations. Currently, I paint on small surfaces and finish a painting in a day or two, working quickly in order to train myself to let the odd combinations happen. Working in an imaginary space lets me create situations that bypass storytelling and yet frame desire and resolution in the unexpected.