Leon Johnson: OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER

MAY 2010


Leon Johnson

Overland Offshore Downriver

LEON JOHNSON OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER OPENING RECEPTION: FIRST FRIDAY MAY 7, 6–10 PERFORMANCE/SCREENING: FRIDAY MAY 14, 6–8 CAPETOWN TO CAIRO: THE EMPIRE POSTCARDS A SCREENING OF FAUST/FAUSTUS IN DEPTFORD  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEPortland, Maine, April 30 2010Gallery 37-A is pleased to present Leon Johnson OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER, May 6 – May 30 - Opening Reception First Friday May 7th 6–10pm. Performance/Screening: Friday May 14, 6–8pm “Cape Town to Cairo: The Empire Postcards” and “Faust/Faustus in Deptford”.Leon Johnson is an artist who works in a wide variety of mediums, formats and delivery mechanisms. “Overland Offshore Downriver” will present drawings, paintings and sculptures from the artist alongside an artist-curated selection of works that figure prominently in Johnson’s life/work resulting in a wunderkammer of Johnson’s multi-faceted approach to creative production. In addition, a one night only performance of Johnson’s “Cape Town to Cairo: The Empire Postcards” will be delivered with a screening of the artists’ film: “Faust/Faustus in Deptford” 15min. video on May 14th. This is an opportunity to engage with one of Maine’s most forward-thinking artists at Gallery 37-A, Wharf Street, Portland, Maine.Artist Bio Leon Johnson (b.1959 Cape Town, South Africa) conceives, researches, designs and produces intermedia communications and events. These events include performances and interactive spectacles in traditional and non-traditional sites. His delivery systems include installation, performance, video, photography, digital and traditional print systems, book arts, painting and discrete objects. Recent performances have included “Empire Postcards: My Colonial Father[s]” in England and Toronto, a UK tour of “Faust/Faustus: A Duet For Devils” and “reMEMBERING WILDE” an intermedia performance featuring an original score by Jeffrey Stolet. Johnson’s short film, FAUST/FAUSTUS IN DEPTFORD was selected for the KunstFilmBienale in Cologne, Germany, and the Raindance Film Festival in London. Johnson has received a Jackson Pollock-Lee Krasner Foundation Grant for Painting, a Yaddo Residency and three Cuts + Burns Residencies at The Outpost in New York. His printing operation, The Long Bell Press is represented by Printed Matter Inc. in New York and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Ruth + Marvin Sackner Archive Of Concrete + Visual Poetry, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In October he will open DUAL SITE, a dinner theater project, at The Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, The Red House in Syracuse, and Hexagon Space in Baltimore. He assumes the Chair of Fine Arts position at CCS, Detroit, in the Fall.About Gallery 37-AGallery 37-A is a new project space, initiated in December of 2009 by Brook Delorme and Daniel Pepice. Presenting exhibitions of the work of emerging and established artists, Gallery 37-A is Located at 37A Wharf Street in Portland, Maine’s Old Port District and is open to the public Thursday – Monday 12 – 6pm and by appointment.For Further Information, Please contactBrook DeLorme, brookdel@yahoo.comDaniel Pepice, danieljohnpepice@gmail.comLeon Johnson on OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER“This boundary stream, that mound, the scattered vestigial enclaves and their speech forms, the lime-washed sacral enclosures; so far by means as fragile, vulnerable and scarcely tangible, these the elusive things of the world have, in a tattered fragmentary sort of way, been tabernacled for us.”    David JonesA layer of the palimpsest of accreted affinities, the “deposits” that constitute distance – the distance between you and me, home and abroad, life and death, past and future – is mapped in this simple tabernacle. A fond cloister of alliances, a sanctuary for both cadaver and phoenix. My practice amounts to the husbandry of these trans-historical conversations - sustained by desire, curiosity, and solidarity - relentlessly seeking reclamation, restitution, and revelation. Overland, offshore, and downriver. Faust/Faustus In Deptford: A Travelogue.  Video, 15 minutes, London and Paris.Faust/Faustus in Deptford, a 15-minute digital video directed by Leon Johnson, imagines Christopher Marlowe’s 16thC Faustus and Goethe’s 19thC Faust in the last few minutes of their lives as nomadic allies. This travelogue interweaves documentation of live performance and psycho-geographical drift, triangulating the unmapped distances between the Faustus legend, Christopher Marlowe’s death in Deptford near the river Thames and Oscar Wilde’s vandalized tomb in Paris.The travelogue begins with an image of Faustus’ Helen of Troy, a flaming relic cursing history, mocking fame, taunting Marlowe’s Faustus in his last hour as he tries to recall the pleasures of his decadent contracts and begins to perceive his own double and double-Helen from Goethe’s Faust. Faustus and Faust meet to wander points of location and of loss. First emerging from the Woolwich Arsenal Tunnel, Faust and Faustus ascend from under the river to the light of this “new world” drifting from the river to nearby Maryon Park, the exact site where Michaelangelo Antonioni filmed (in 1966) the scene of the crime at the center of Blow- Up, a scene and site in sympathetic riddle to the journey Faust and Faustus are making. The primary directional shift of the travelogue is from the documentation of an “intervention” at the site of Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a determined pilgrimage to repair for a silver moment a 1919 act of dismemberment against the Sphinx that hovers atop Wilde’s tomb. In this duty of reMembering, Faust and Faustus pay their last respects, honoring the generative sympathy resistant to scandal and ruin. From Paris, the two are able to make their final trip to Deptford, to visit the site of Marlowe’s murder and burial ground, another riddled loss of a poet both decadent and brave, another prophet of this new world. And from the graveyard they find their way along a blighted urban path in Deptford to the polluted banks of the river Thames, where, in fading light, the travelogue documents a final drift of chance discovery – a rusted message, a final memory of unmappable love, and the appearance in blue twilight of a miserable guide to the next or the last destination.

LEON JOHNSON

OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER

OPENING RECEPTION: FIRST FRIDAY MAY 7, 6–10 
PERFORMANCE/SCREENING: FRIDAY MAY 14, 6–8 

CAPETOWN TO CAIRO: THE EMPIRE POSTCARDS 
A SCREENING OF FAUST/FAUSTUS IN DEPTFORD 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Portland, Maine, April 30 2010


Gallery 37-A is pleased to present Leon Johnson OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER, May 6 – May 30 - Opening Reception First Friday May 7th 6–10pm. Performance/Screening: Friday May 14, 6–8pm “Cape Town to Cairo: The Empire Postcards” and “Faust/Faustus in Deptford”.

Leon Johnson is an artist who works in a wide variety of mediums, formats and delivery mechanisms. “Overland Offshore Downriver” will present drawings, paintings and sculptures from the artist alongside an artist-curated selection of works that figure prominently in Johnson’s life/work resulting in a wunderkammer of Johnson’s multi-faceted approach to creative production. In addition, a one night only performance of Johnson’s “Cape Town to Cairo: The Empire Postcards” will be delivered with a screening of the artists’ film: “Faust/Faustus in Deptford” 15min. video on May 14th. This is an opportunity to engage with one of Maine’s most forward-thinking artists at Gallery 37-A, Wharf Street, Portland, Maine.

Artist Bio
 
Leon Johnson (b.1959 Cape Town, South Africa) conceives, researches, designs and produces intermedia communications and events. These events include performances and interactive spectacles in traditional and non-traditional sites. His delivery systems include installation, performance, video, photography, digital and traditional print systems, book arts, painting and discrete objects. Recent performances have included “Empire Postcards: My Colonial Father[s]” in England and Toronto, a UK tour of “Faust/Faustus: A Duet For Devils” and “reMEMBERING WILDE” an intermedia performance featuring an original score by Jeffrey Stolet. Johnson’s short film, FAUST/FAUSTUS IN DEPTFORD was selected for the KunstFilmBienale in Cologne, Germany, and the Raindance Film Festival in London. Johnson has received a Jackson Pollock-Lee Krasner Foundation Grant for Painting, a Yaddo Residency and three Cuts + Burns Residencies at The Outpost in New York. His printing operation, The Long Bell Press is represented by Printed Matter Inc. in New York and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Ruth + Marvin Sackner Archive Of Concrete + Visual Poetry, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In October he will open DUAL SITE, a dinner theater project, at The Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, The Red House in Syracuse, and Hexagon Space in Baltimore. He assumes the Chair of Fine Arts position at CCS, Detroit, in the Fall.


About Gallery 37-A

Gallery 37-A is a new project space, initiated in December of 2009 by Brook Delorme and Daniel Pepice. Presenting exhibitions of the work of emerging and established artists, Gallery 37-A is Located at 37A Wharf Street in Portland, Maine’s Old Port District and is open to the public Thursday – Monday 12 – 6pm and by appointment.

For Further Information, Please contact
Brook DeLorme, brookdel@yahoo.com
Daniel Pepice, danieljohnpepice@gmail.com


Leon Johnson on OVERLAND OFFSHORE DOWNRIVER

“This boundary stream, that mound, the scattered vestigial enclaves and their speech forms, the lime-washed sacral enclosures; so far by means as fragile, vulnerable and scarcely tangible, these the elusive things of the world have, in a tattered fragmentary sort of way, been tabernacled for us.”    David Jones

A layer of the palimpsest of accreted affinities, the “deposits” that constitute distance – the distance between you and me, home and abroad, life and death, past and future – is mapped in this simple tabernacle. A fond cloister of alliances, a sanctuary for both cadaver and phoenix. My practice amounts to the husbandry of these trans-historical conversations - sustained by desire, curiosity, and solidarity - relentlessly seeking reclamation, restitution, and revelation. Overland, offshore, and downriver.

 
Faust/Faustus In Deptford: A Travelogue.  Video, 15 minutes, London and Paris.
Faust/Faustus in Deptford, a 15-minute digital video directed by Leon Johnson, imagines Christopher Marlowe’s 16thC Faustus and Goethe’s 19thC Faust in the last few minutes of their lives as nomadic allies. This travelogue interweaves documentation of live performance and psycho-geographical drift, triangulating the unmapped distances between the Faustus legend, Christopher Marlowe’s death in Deptford near the river Thames and Oscar Wilde’s vandalized tomb in Paris.
The travelogue begins with an image of Faustus’ Helen of Troy, a flaming relic cursing history, mocking fame, taunting Marlowe’s Faustus in his last hour as he tries to recall the pleasures of his decadent contracts and begins to perceive his own double and double-Helen from Goethe’s Faust. Faustus and Faust meet to wander points of location and of loss. First emerging from the Woolwich Arsenal Tunnel, Faust and Faustus ascend from under the river to the light of this “new world” drifting from the river to nearby Maryon Park, the exact site where Michaelangelo Antonioni filmed (in 1966) the scene of the crime at the center of Blow- Up, a scene and site in sympathetic riddle to the journey Faust and Faustus are making. The primary directional shift of the travelogue is from the documentation of an “intervention” at the site of Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a determined pilgrimage to repair for a silver moment a 1919 act of dismemberment against the Sphinx that hovers atop Wilde’s tomb. In this duty of reMembering, Faust and Faustus pay their last respects, honoring the generative sympathy resistant to scandal and ruin. From Paris, the two are able to make their final trip to Deptford, to visit the site of Marlowe’s murder and burial ground, another riddled loss of a poet both decadent and brave, another prophet of this new world. And from the graveyard they find their way along a blighted urban path in Deptford to the polluted banks of the river Thames, where, in fading light, the travelogue documents a final drift of chance discovery – a rusted message, a final memory of unmappable love, and the appearance in blue twilight of a miserable guide to the next or the last destination.