User:Sonnyhan5

Johnson’s unique vision is inspired by a range of instances throughout art history, from great master painters to early modernism and cinema to contemporary photography. A student of architecture, throughout the 1970s, Johnson (American, b. 1955) worked closely with architects Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi and Lebbeus Wood. In the 1980s, Johnson began working in both visual and performance art, collaborating with numerous artists from Nan Goldin and Jon Lurie to Robbie McCauley, Kiki Smith and Jimmie Durham. During this period, Johnson’s sensitivities to pressing social and cultural issues led him to pursue media work as a political activist, co-founding the television collective, XchangeTV. During this time, he also produced his Postcard Action series now held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the late 1980s, Johnson moved to Central America where he co-founded two television collectives in Mexico and El Salvador, at the height of political unrest. In 1991, Johnson returned to Los Angeles, where he worked in the film industry, creating and supervising visual effects for major studio films including The Matrix and Titanic. He has spent the last decade exploring his inventive new series of timeline photography.

Since 1996, Johnson has lived in Paris, Antwerp, Rome and Tuscany. His work is held by prestigious private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Langen Foundation and Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe). Johnson currently resides in Venice, California, and his work has been seen throughout Los Angeles and around the globe.