Gwynne Johnson

(American, b. 1976; resides in Chicago, IL)

Interested in memory as an ever-changing, corruptible, and ambiguous part of human perception, Gwynne Johnson confronts the unresolved emotions of her father’s death in the series Revisions (2012). The project began with the impossible self-appointed mission of finding her deceased father at the same racetracks she often frequented with him as a child. While the audience is transfixed on the race, Johnson photographs men who, in fleeting glimpses, resemble her father. Each photograph serves as an act of reconstruction, with every new image replacing her previous attempts. Vaguely descriptive, the accumulation of images reveal themselves only as spurious stand-ins, ultimately expanding the division between the anonymous figures and the memory of her father, and leaving the images, as Johnson describes, to “linger in a space that suggests identity, but that identity can never be confirmed.”

Born in Ireland, Gwynne Johnson immigrated to the United States when she was eighteen. She completed a BA in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1999) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011). Johnson has held solo exhibitions at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition Gallery (2012) and at Gallery X, Chicago (2011), and has had work included in shows at Cave, Detroit (2013), Kimmel Galleries (2012), Gallery Nine, Belfast (2012); The Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2012); Andrea Meislin, New York (2012). She has been the recipient of awards including the CAAP Grant (2012, 2008), James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship (2010), and was a finalist for the Lenore Annenberg Fellowship for the Visual Arts. Johnson currently lives and works in Chicago.

https://www.gwynnejohnson.com/