JOANNA JOHNSON
Photography/ Installation
Lives & works in Austin, TX

Above and Beneath

Boom

Around and Through

The Way

Path to Redemption

On the Edge

Blown

In Between

JoAnna Johnson                           
Artist Statement  

The work is part performance art, part textile culture, part feminist statement, part installation art, and part photography.  These images are haunting because of the presence reinforced by the absence of the wearers of these dresses.  This other worldly feeling becomes stranger and more keenly understood as the locations and displays change.  There is the strength of a sisterhood of the group brought together. The gentleness and grace of the female spirit inhabits the spaces where these dresses slowly dance as memories of past gatherings, and feminine rituals.  They are soft, flowing, and vulnerable as black orchids, and of course, as silent as the grave. The silence in these pictures is deafening, while everything in them and around them seems to be holding its breath.  These photographs are suggestive and poignant, leaving one with the feeling that, as viewers, you are walking among victims and goddesses, all at the same time. 

I have constructed more than 100 dresses in the last eight years to photograph in the landscape. The 30 Black dresses are the most recent. I cut, sewed, and ironed each one. They are reminiscent of late 19th century women’s attire, but their blackness somehow neutralizes them, or even transforms them into negative space. I place the “empty” dresses in a variety of natural settings including the Midwest, Texas and New Mexico.