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Merritt Johnson’s work is a navigation of periphery, intersectionality, separation and connection. Her multidisciplinary works are containers for thought and feeling. For two decades Johnson’s work has insisted on facing and destroying the oppression of bodies, land, sex, and culture. Her practice is a synthesis of necessity, a refusal of binaries, fractions of division and control. She embraces peripheral overlap and the impossibility of disentanglement. Johnson is pan-sexual cis-gender woman of mixed descent, she is not claimed by, nor a citizen of any nation from which she descends. The multiplicity of materials and processes Johnson employs embody her insistence that a multiplicity of tools is needed to destroy oppressive systems and survive them. She creates tools for critical thought and action: seed baskets woven in the shapes of hand-grenades and a portable oxygen tank, wearable bolts cutters, a tin can telephone to listen to land, a basket to translate a heartbeat to a love song, paintings mapping invisibility, and instructional videos to exorcise America from our bodies, land and water. Johnson is the mother and stepmother of 6 children, and holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston). She lives and works with her family on Lingít Aani, her partner’s home territory, in Sitka Alaska.
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My painting practice is concerned with the impossible attempt to make images of land and water. Land and water exist longer, deeper and more broadly than can be fully understood or experienced by any single life or type of life. The paintings I make include attempts to illustrate our inability to see land, documenting instances of human impact on land and water through violence and misunderstanding, illustrating the persistence of land and water, drawing the connection of land and water to all things living, and envisioning resistance. The land does not belong to us; land does not exist for our pleasure, to look, use, own, desire, or control. We belong to land, we exist because of land and water’s ability and choice to sustain us. So my painting practice refutes the concept of landscape as a site for the human centered experience or gaze. I seek to turn our gaze into a critical investigation of who and how we are, our importance to land and water in relation to our perceived self importance. My paintings depict human enforced boarders, and extraction as violent limitations to be relentlessly dismantled, intentionally worn away and rotted. My process of painting and drawing in layers looks to land and water as teacher, building up, washing away, and wearing through.
