Artist Statement

Liv Monique Johnson’s work focuses on natural environments becoming alien. Drawing on depictions of idealized backdrops, Johnson’s imagery explores the disruption to presumptions of paradise with glimpses of encroaching phenomena. These are harbingers of landscapes asserting themselves as active entities, reducing human agency as they exert their own. As the landscapes change, man-made structures and markers become submerged in phantom tides moving through increasingly permeable partitions. These scenes represent a gathering of uncanny settings and intangible currents leading toward a pinnacle of action, converting the viewer to a witness anticipating terrible and awesome forces of transformation.

Johnson’s practice incorporates a wide range of printmaking techniques including etching and woodcut techniques that involve a pain-staking process of applying and reducing anywhere from three to nine layers of color, printed one on top of the other. These translucent layers create a final image rich in a variety of colors and textures. Her installations use screenprints on cut and formed paper as well as other media to create organic three-dimensional forms.

Bio

Born and raised in Pahoa, Hawaii, Liv Monique Johnson earned her BA in Art at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and her MFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Printmaking and Sculpture at Texas Tech University. She now lives in Houston where she continues to develop her studio work and is an Instructor and Printmaking Department Head for the Glassell Studio School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.