Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College is pleased to presentSTAND UP,a solo exhibition by Andrew Ellis Johnson. The show will be on view from August 29th – October 13th, and we will host an opening reception on Thursday, August 29th from 5 – 6:30 p.m. where Johnson will offer an artist talk in the Gallery at 5:30 p.m.
Through a series of ink and mixed media on paper drawings, Johnson dives into the strangeness surrounding contemporary politics and policy in the US. Employing a kind of literalism in his subject matter, his metaphors are almost always a little too on the nose. In his work LIBERTY LIBERTY, Johnson depicts the Liberty Bell snuffing out the torch flame of the Statue of Liberty in a ¾ life sized drawing measuring twelve feet tall. In his work THE ORIGINALISTS: DELIVERING GREATER JUSTICE (2022), Johnson depicts Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts performing a cesarian section birth to an incapacitated woman. Ever interested in politics and history, Andrew Ellis Johnson fleshes out a fantastically bizarre set of unrealities. His unrestrained vignettes remind us of political comics, but time and again, there is no punch line, just the punch.
Across a variety of media and tactics, Johnson explores social and political issues and injustices, treating representation —not as a hermetic mimetic pictorial tradition —but as a way to awaken and combat torpor. Exhibition topics have included: the Haitian grass roots movement; homelessness; predatory economics; hemispheric hegemonies; unabated sowing of land mines; crises in the Middle East; cultural eclipses; the visibility and invisibility of communication;consequences of war and violence; meditations on labor and myth; our response to refugees and immigrants; allegorical interrogations of American history; and contending with climate change.Venues for his work have included museums, galleries, electronic arts and video festivals, public collaborations, conferences, books and journals in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Andrew Ellis Johnson was born in Cortland, New York to a jazz guitarist, civil war historian father and science major mother who, together, won many bowling tournaments. He made his first film cycle on the battle of Gettysburg at 9, miniature marzipan figurines of Fats Waller at 11, and first life-size faux bronze sculpture of Baron Manfred von Richtoven at the age of 13.Pursuing film and painting, he studied at SUNY Buffalo and completed his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After years in Europe and Asia, he earned an MFA in Art at Carnegie Mellon while serving as an artist-in-residence at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and curating an exhibition of inmate art.
Subsequently he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a residency through Poznan Academy of Art in Poland. After several years of nomadic teaching and a five-month studio stint in Amsterdam, he taught for five years at University at Buffalo where he co-founded PED, a socially engaged collective that has performed in Buffalo, Belfast, Chongqing, Rio de Janeiro, St. John’s, Tonawanda, and Toronto. In 2004, he joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University where he is now Associate Professor of Art. Residency projects include those at Korean National University of the Arts in Seoul, Fayoum International Art Center in Egypt, University of the Arts London at Camberwell, Sites of Passage in Jerusalem/Ramallah/Pittsburgh, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.