Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Tim Johnson’s latest body of work expands on his explorations of nostalgia, delving deeper into the intersection of personal and societal experience. His sculptures transform the comfort and familiarity of domestic objects—bed frames, wooden railings, crayons—into echoes of larger structures: factories, fields, houses, and smokestacks.
Rooted in his Midwestern heritage, Johnson’s work is shaped not only by the materials he sources—often from thrift stores and surplus depots in his home city of Detroit—but also by the themes they evoke. His palette of industrial greys and blues, contrasted with earthy browns, reds, and greens, reflects the duality of the Midwest: the lush farmland set against the grit of an industrial landscape.
Rather than subverting this heritage, Johnson embraces it. His sculptures fit within the aesthetic of a family home, incorporating familiar motifs—carved hearts, landscape imagery, and traditional woodworking—while recontextualizing them into abstract forms. The result is something both entirely new and deeply familiar, resonating with the essence of a Midwestern past reimagined in the present.