Admission of Structure (2023-ongoing)
lithographs with colored pencil, crayon, grease marker, sumi ink, and gouache, mounted on dibond panels
selection from series, and installation views as exhibited at Harcourt House Gallery, Edmonton, below:
lithographs with colored pencil, crayon, grease marker, sumi ink, and gouache, mounted on dibond panels
selection from series, and installation views as exhibited at Harcourt House Gallery, Edmonton, below:
Admission of Structure
the following text by Elizabeth Herbert accompanied the exhibit of works from this series at Harcourt House Gallery in March of 2024:
The question “what is it?” is as old as humanity itself. It is the business of the artist to ponder the significance of the last word of the question, and it is through the work of the artist that we may begin to experience the received wisdom of the response “it is a …” as a constraint. Take printers’ blocks, for example. Insofar as they are tools for creating texts, they are at the heart of our histories. As objects they are ordinary, or of the order of things that have little or no intrinsic value. Luke Johnson’s ongoing series of prints collectively titled Admission of Structure suggest that the relationship between objects and meaning may be inherently unstable, and so also our conventional distinctions between acts of discernment and creation.
Johnson’s process is a key to understanding how a certain kind of printers’ block called an “em space” became his subject. Simply, they are that part of the printers’ arsenal of letter blocks that are used to make blank spaces between and around words. So in a text, the evidence of this block is literally nothingness. Within the family of letter blocks; A, B, C, and so on, it is the ever present and unremarked introvert. But like them, the em spaces are set up, discarded, slid, dragged and sometimes dropped on the floor to be grabbed up and knocked firmly back into their intended places. When Johnson picked some of these blocks up and turned them over, sure enough their undersides were rich with chips, cracks, and abrasions of all degrees of severity. It was the unseen-ness of the small surfaces that resonated with Johnson’s creative imagination, and thus shaped his process.
In these prints the em spaces are transfigured into spectral images of quiet gravitas that persist within the endlessly receding darkness of space. Their wounds are at one and the same time formal devices that unify broken structures, fix the edges of rectangles to the picture space against the nearly irresistible power of the void to absorb and obliterate all things. The cracked structure in one print is held together by a small parenthesis shaped mark, and fixed to the picture plane by a barely-there curvilinear top edge.
In another print, the entire em space is seen from above. Its flat surface bears mysterious traces of wear that evoke images of an archaeological find, like the fossilized finger marks of an ancient child in a clay bed. But this is the em space block, now risen to the light. Its square velvet expanse is bordered by the softened irregular lines of the object itself. Now we can see the whole thing, looking down at it like the printer would have done. To paraphrase the great Surrealist: this is not an em space block, it is an image. The distinction is signalled by the contrast between the worn perimeter of the block and the sharp black borderlines of the print itself. They lie close to each other but they are never the same, and this distinction reminds us that the artist is both inventor and discoverer.
— Elizabeth Herbert
the following text by Elizabeth Herbert accompanied the exhibit of works from this series at Harcourt House Gallery in March of 2024:
The question “what is it?” is as old as humanity itself. It is the business of the artist to ponder the significance of the last word of the question, and it is through the work of the artist that we may begin to experience the received wisdom of the response “it is a …” as a constraint. Take printers’ blocks, for example. Insofar as they are tools for creating texts, they are at the heart of our histories. As objects they are ordinary, or of the order of things that have little or no intrinsic value. Luke Johnson’s ongoing series of prints collectively titled Admission of Structure suggest that the relationship between objects and meaning may be inherently unstable, and so also our conventional distinctions between acts of discernment and creation.
Johnson’s process is a key to understanding how a certain kind of printers’ block called an “em space” became his subject. Simply, they are that part of the printers’ arsenal of letter blocks that are used to make blank spaces between and around words. So in a text, the evidence of this block is literally nothingness. Within the family of letter blocks; A, B, C, and so on, it is the ever present and unremarked introvert. But like them, the em spaces are set up, discarded, slid, dragged and sometimes dropped on the floor to be grabbed up and knocked firmly back into their intended places. When Johnson picked some of these blocks up and turned them over, sure enough their undersides were rich with chips, cracks, and abrasions of all degrees of severity. It was the unseen-ness of the small surfaces that resonated with Johnson’s creative imagination, and thus shaped his process.
In these prints the em spaces are transfigured into spectral images of quiet gravitas that persist within the endlessly receding darkness of space. Their wounds are at one and the same time formal devices that unify broken structures, fix the edges of rectangles to the picture space against the nearly irresistible power of the void to absorb and obliterate all things. The cracked structure in one print is held together by a small parenthesis shaped mark, and fixed to the picture plane by a barely-there curvilinear top edge.
In another print, the entire em space is seen from above. Its flat surface bears mysterious traces of wear that evoke images of an archaeological find, like the fossilized finger marks of an ancient child in a clay bed. But this is the em space block, now risen to the light. Its square velvet expanse is bordered by the softened irregular lines of the object itself. Now we can see the whole thing, looking down at it like the printer would have done. To paraphrase the great Surrealist: this is not an em space block, it is an image. The distinction is signalled by the contrast between the worn perimeter of the block and the sharp black borderlines of the print itself. They lie close to each other but they are never the same, and this distinction reminds us that the artist is both inventor and discoverer.
— Elizabeth Herbert
