Reasons

For the exhibition title, Reasons, Johnson was inspired by the eponymous song by American band Earth, Wind & Fire, as the lyrics are closely linked with the meaning of the works on display. In each of his works, the artist encompasses the reasons that were the source of inspiration for their genesis: reasons inspired by the attempt to investigate personal questions as well as universal issues that Johnson strives to explore through his work. The media presented in the exhibition are diverse—black soap, wax, ceramic tile, spray enamel, books, vinyl records, oyster shells, shea butter, live plants with grow lights—but are all familiar from the artist's multivalent practice, and through their repeated use many have become Johnson's signature materials, offering a gateway to the artist's world: sculpture, painting, installation and video.
Some elements are bearers of a cultural phenomenon: wax, soap and shea butter were widely used during the African diaspora and were later associated with the cultural ideology of Afrocentrism in the United States in the late twentieth century; vinyl records and books refer to a more intimate story which alludes to the albums that the artist listened to as a boy. His father's electrical instruments and texts the artist took from his mother's library form part of what is defined as the memorialization of the process of appropriation and re-transposition of the domestic space.
All the materials carry these memories, but in the artist's hands they become the objects of a broader narration. Taken out of their original context, they have been chosen for their ability to interact; they lose their biographical or knowledge-related connotation and are used as instruments that can create signs and graphic traces, becoming lines and thus references to minimal art, as elements to distribute information and subtexts. For Johnson “the artist functions as a time traveller” and his work is “a means or portal to effectively rewrite history, not as a revision but as a work of fiction”.