ARTISTS TALKING

The dark cavernous rooms and passageways of the Roundhouse have found themselves home to a series of curious hybrid creations. David Johnson has constructed these sculptures and installations with a lucid fusion of found objects and elemental materials.

A slide projector is used to create chimerical scenes like Imaginary Landscape No.2, in which the reflections of a hazy summer afternoon creeping across the wall appear to emanate from within a wardrobe whose interior is itself dark. Similarly in Facing the Dark the soft panes of moonlight on the floor seem to shine through a window, whose frame is hung and lit by the slide projected through it onto the floor. This spectral light conjures illusion and artifice, blurring the boundaries of the real and the unreal.

Untitled (Moon) presents the poignant simplicity of a crescent moon projected onto the surface of milk in the bottom of a bucket. The vessel, and the liquid within, act as body signifiers. The idea of containment and reversal – the moon held within the bucket – effects a confusion of inside and outside, self and other, body and world, mind and substance. The self is opened up and the cosmos collapses inward.

In the central chamber of this space, two wooden boats sit on the stone floor. One, titled The Sea of Unknowing, is filled with black ink, on which floats a tiny toy boat carrying a nightlight. The other, Ocean, contains milk that appears to reflect the stars, acting as a screen for the projection of a photograph of a clear night sky. Here the inversion is more radical. Boats are designed to keep liquid out, but instead these seem to have swallowed the oceans and the skies.

These are haunting essays in matter and light, that speak of absence and death, being and consciousness, and the illusory character of perception and representation.