Erin Johnson: Selected Films  

Erin Johnson: Selected Films

 

Erin Johnson, If It Won’t Hold Water, It Surely Won’t Hold a Goat (still), 2014.

Erin Johnson: Selected Films  
Screening and conversation

Admission starts at $5

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Date
June 29, 2023, 7pm
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172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, June 29 at 7pm for a screening of selected short films and video works by Erin Johnson, followed by a conversation between Heather Davis and the artist. 

Focusing on queer mapping, unclassifiable plants, land use, and a herd of goats, this program presents four of Erin Johnson’s videos that explore interspecies relationships and taxonomic blindspots to invite a reappraisal of colonial scientific narratives. 

In To Be Sound Is to Be Solid (2022, 15 minutes), an oceanographer’s attempt to map the entire seafloor by 2030 parallels the filmmaker’s attempt to decipher the opaque queer history of a modernist seaside home through its complicated and circuitous floor plan. There Are Things In This World That Are Yet To Be Named (2020, 8 minutes) pairs images of a plant whose fluid sexual expression has baffled botanists for decades, with voiceover of the private correspondence between influential environmentalist Rachel Carson and her secretly beloved addressee, Dorothy Freeman. Heavy Water (2018, 15 minutes) follows a Department of Energy biologist tasked with studying the impact of radioactive waste on animals living in the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons complex in South Carolina. The two-channel video brings together the precarious, untenable future of nuclear waste with the uncertain past of a breed of dogs living on the site, following tensions between individual and state, ecological diversity and climate change. If It Won’t Hold Water, It Surely Won’t Hold a Goat (2014, 10 minutes) is an intimate meditation on the subversive nature of goats and their effect on the people who spend time with them. 

The screening of the films will be followed by a discussion with Heather Davis on the intersections of queer life and nature.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                  
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.       
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

Category
Film, Colonialism & Imperialism
Subject
Science, Queer Art & Theory, Plants & Forests, Animals

Erin Johnson’s videos and immersive installations explore the experience of being in groups. Drawing upon queer communities, histories of organizing, and networks of non-human life, Johnson’s work challenges colonial scientific narratives and normative truth claims. Her work centers the practices of artists, biologists, and film extras to examine Western sovereignty and map out lines of flight. Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and recently completed residencies at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), Surf Point (York, ME), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (NY, NY), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), and Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY). Her work has recently been exhibited at REDCAT (LA), MOCA Toronto (Toronto), Munchmuseet (Oslo), Times Square Arts (New York), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), Billytown (The Hague), Sanatorium (Istanbul), and Images Festival (Toronto). She is Chair of the Department of Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is represented by Galleria Eugenia Delfini (Rome).

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and has lectured internationally. She is the coeditor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada.

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