Glowlab

Glowlab Exhibition dates: October 8 – November 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday October 8. 7–9pm
Admission: free
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday. 12-6pm
Location: 30 Grand Street between Thompson St. and 6th Ave.
Event link: http://www.glowlab.com/johnson-air-and-blood/

New York, NY (September 16, 2009) - Glowlab is pleased to pres...ent Air and Blood, a solo exhibition of works by Heather L. Johnson featuring a new series of drawings and embroideries along with a text-based installation situated within the gallery and the surrounding neighborhood.

Glowlab will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 8, 2009 from 7-9 pm.

Johnson’s new body of work fixates on the circulatory nature of urban movement. Air and Blood references the connection that urban inhabitants, either transient or permanent, have with overarching public transportation systems. Using the Holland Tunnel as a point of departure, the artist investigates the way in which anatomical processes are mimicked in the transfer of people, objects and ideas in the urban environment.

Often simply regarded as a thoroughfare, the Holland Tunnel also functions as an immense communal lung. As an avid motorcyclist, the artist is more aware of the life giving exchange of gases that incessantly takes place. She physically feels the synthetic gusts that most motorists take for granted. This acute awareness informs Johnson’s body of work and elicits an equally discerning response from the viewer.

For Air and Blood, Johnson gleaned images and text that reference the Holland Tunnel and its surrounding neighborhood and repurposed them as fodder for intricate drawings, installations and embroideries. The fastidious nature of Johnson’s work and the explicit evidencing of her hand force the viewer to reconsider objects and systems that are only tacitly acknowledged. The artist is a cartographer of experience, intricately mapping observations that link a seemingly disconnected populace.

Johnson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has completed residencies at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC, and at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S., in Europe and Japan, at White Columns (New York City), Austin Museum of Art (Austin, TX), Gallery 16 (San Francisco), Room Space (Gentilly, France), Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (Sonoma, CA), and many other venues. She has curated several exhibitions, including Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape, involving artists from around the world, and most recently, The Pickup, a project of site-specific works created in collaboration with artist/curator Eleanor Eichenbaum Eubanks for Conflux 2008 in New York City. She currently lives in Weehawken, NJ.