Freight+Volume is pleased to present Ezra Johnson’s Home and Garden Show, featuring a new group of paintings and sculpture by Ezra Johnson. The title alludes to the home improvement lifestyle - indoor and outdoor - and the labor involved. These paintings are primarily set in Tampa, FL, where swamp, jungle and suburb overlap and where the artist lives. They are in conversation with many recent and past American painters such as McEneaney, Porter, Neel, Freilicher and others. Johnson begins each work with direct observation from life, followed by a laborious (and sometimes chaotic) studio process of revision and overpainting.
Monsters Live in Your Head is comprised of 21 facades of suburban American homes; in front of each home appears a simple signboard posting a letter. The collective effect spells the title: Monsters Live in Your Head. The phrase isn’t aimed at the individuals in these specific homes, but rather hints that we can easily become isolated individuals, trapped within our own subjective experiences. Johnson began this series of paintings from his car while driving around town.
In several of the works, Johnson paints scenes of his family: Haircut, Susanna in a Chair and Kid at the Party, each blending initial observation and iterative studio work. Surfaces become layered as the paintings evolve, details are pared back, and colors have been chosen for their sensations rather than realism.
In Studio Table, the artist’s studio appears cluttered, a kaleidoscope of color and canvases, scattered together around a wooden worktable. This table is the central station of the artist’s studio practice, which often expands from painting into sculpture and animation. In Paint Cans, piles of colorful cans are strewn throughout the gallery; the initial believability comes from the notion that no one would look closely enough to question their existence. Upon closer inspection the cans are tubular paintings. The artist’s colors are piled up and spilling out - they were made using the overmixed paint from Johnson’s other works. It’s an experiment in how color exists as both a fact and as a poetic illusion, with meaning difficult to pin down.
In addition to his multifaceted painting practice, Johnson has extensive experience with stop frame animation, carpentry and renovation (particularly on his residences in Florida and London, and his various studios). These talents serve the artist well on his mission to celebrate and elevate the mundane, the everyday objects and routines of home and garden, and of life. Whether it's recycling plastic waste, repurposing paint cans or simply watching his son get a haircut, Johnson examines the basics - the nuts and bolts of existence - and through evolved artistic practice makes all of this refined.
Ezra Johnson is a painter based in Tampa, Florida, and London, UK. He was born in 1975 in Wenatchee, Washington. Johnson received an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2006 and a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2000. His painting practice regularly expands into animation and sculpture.
Johnson has exhibited at many prestigious museums, such as the Nerman Museum of Art in Kansas, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Site Santa Fe Biennial, and the ICA in Philadelphia, as well as in gallery exhibitions both nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida in Tampa.