PinchukArtCentre

Rindon Johnson

Rindon Johnson is an artist. His solo exhibitions in New York and London will open as a co-commission of Sculpture Center and Chisenhale Gallery in winter and fall of 2021. Johnson has participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Museum; Literaturhaus, Berlin; SculptureCenter; FACT Liverpool; National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne and HeK, Basel. Johnson has performed at Artists Space, MoMA PS1, Human Resources and The Poetry Project. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017) and Shade the King (Capricious, 2017). His most recent film, “Meat Growers: A Love Story” was commissioned by Rhizome and Tentacular. He lives in Berlin where he researches VR at the Universität der Künste, Berlin.
Rindon Johnson is an artist. His solo exhibitions in New York and London will open as a co-commission of Sculpture Center and Chisenhale Gallery in winter and fall of 2021. Johnson has participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Museum; Literaturhaus, Berlin; SculptureCenter; FACT Liverpool; National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne and HeK, Basel. Johnson has performed at Artists Space, MoMA PS1, Human Resources and The Poetry Project. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017) and Shade the King (Capricious, 2017). His most recent film, “Meat Growers: A Love Story” was commissioned by Rhizome and Tentacular. He lives in Berlin where he researches VR at the Universität der Künste, Berlin.

The installation emerges around a sci-fi novel called Clattering. The story, written in collaboration with writer Diana Hamilton, began as a proposition for open-mindedness, multiplicity, and opposition to the organizational states of our world, which is mostly built on various forms of dualism. Rindon Johnson’s practice is bound up with writing, which he scales up to spatial installations that contain various elements or media.

In the novel, Clattering, the authors question our accustomed perspective on relationships, hierarchical structures, reproductive systems, and resource control. Johnson and Hamilton ask these questions by creating subtle but important differences between humans and their human-like characters. The authors decided early on that in Clattering there would be no gender, no hunger, no war, no physical violence. Against this backdrop the conventions of our actual world look very different.

The story unfolds when the main characters of the book discover that the initial inhabitants of their planet were immortal until a certain knowledge was taken away from them. Among five protagonists only one enters the exhibition space, a glassmaker called Sima. A replica of Sima’s dream is seen as a central large-scale installation of an iridescent cloud depicted in stained glass. This visual experience brought them to the understanding that in one beam of light all colors exist at once. This comprehension suggests a perspective of inclusion and fullness.

The LED wall, which both opposes and illuminates the glass piece, shows the Bay of Jaffir, one part of the landscape of the video game version of Clattering. The video invites viewers to watch the shifts in light across the bay, through the trees, as the three planets move through the sky over the course of a day and a night.