Ezra Johnson

In a practice that merges the still and moving image, Ezra Johnson produces paintings and animation, fostering a synergy between these two media that pushes each beyond its material parameters. In his words, “I use each medium to propel the other in sort of a perpetual motion, creativity machine…In this way, a new logic and energy begin to form between the two.” In his mid-to-large-scale oil on canvas paintings, the logic of time and motion is evident in kinetic brush strokes and patterns that pull the eye across the picture plane, and in ambiguous vignettes— of crashing waves, for example—that read as stills cut from a narrative sequence. Johnson’s labor-intensive animated films are composed of a myriad of individual, painted frames. Alternately abstract and figurative, they are composed of images continually coming into being, animating the process of painting itself.