Situated at Crane Arts’ “Grey Space,” the antechamber to the Icebox, Chewing the Scenery pivots around the center staging of the bright-lit room where midnight-black objects shine like black holes. A modernist clock with no backing ticks the seconds in what seems a profound silence. “the past in the future tense,” by James Johnson, is a simple found-object assemblage, elegant and isolated, that speaks of lives lived, time lost, and a vast unstoppable universe of things, both man-made and natural.
Johnson’s other piece nearby, “Borrowed Scenery,” a dirty white undershirt on which he embroidered some colored doodles, drapes itself to the contours of some stairs like a ghost trying and failing to become invisible. Many of the works in the show imply the human but with few exceptions no humans are imaged in the works, leaving your imagination free to roam where it will.
I guess you the viewer become the human wandering this little universe.
Chewing the Scenery at Crane Arts, James Johnson, “Borrowed Scenery” 2012. Photo courtesy of Meredith Sellers and Jonathan Santoro