I can’t.
Truth be told, I have been trying to figure out how to talk about this show for a few weeks now—luckily it is up for another month plus, so my deliberations can’t have wrecked all chances to see it for anyone that didn’t know about it already. But I still don’t want to do it the injustice of trying to describe it. If you can go see it, please please please do. It is at Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St, NY until October 25th. If you can’t make it there, there are images below on the Deitch site I linked or you could google “chris johanson totalities deitch” and look through the vast quantity of images and videos out there.
My relationship to it is weirdly close; Chris was one of my favorite artists, then my boss, my mentor, still one of my best friends. But unlike his last major solo show at Deitch in 2002, which I helped to build and saw develop first hand, I had nothing to do with this show. He was in New York for a year and a half working on it, painting and accumulating scrap wood the entire time (the show consists of I don’t know how many paintings, and several houses worth of wood, all of which is found/scrapped/recycled), but I had no idea what it was going to be, for the most part, until the opening. And then there it was, this absolutely heroic art gesture, incredibly sensitive, generous and absolutely successfully/functionally/ beautifully political.
Even the smallest works on paper are so incredibly evolved in the scheme of his
oeuvre, and then to consider the context of the entire thing…
Really, this show…
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
Chris Johanson, Totalities
