“Dane Johnson” posted from: The Citrus Report | Art, Culture, News, Graffiti, Music, Street Art, Clothing, Politics, Reviews
The Appropriation of Bad Luck
By j.frede
Los Angeles based artist Dane Johnson is preparing to present a new body of work that takes a close look at people’s bad luck. Paper features photo real-ish paintings of discarded lottery tickets found and collected from around the Los Angeles area since 2008. When I asked him about his motivation for the series Dane explained that it began when he moved to Los Angeles and noticed millions of discarded scratch off lottery tickets all over his Hollywood neighborhood “So I just started collecting them because they looked so great. Aesthetically they are really interesting. They go from being a slick hardedge painting when they are purchased to a messy abstract one when the ticket is played. Everyone scratches off their tickets differently so you are left with unique fingerprint of a moment in time when someone was taking the leap and playing this game of chance.”
The largest of the Lotto Series paintings are 4’ by 6’ acrylic on canvas and the smaller works are gouache on 11” by 16” paper and are painted slightly larger than the actual tickets themselves “ There isn’t any masking involved so it definitely has a hand made look to it. I try my best to make them perfect but it never works out that way. Some people thought they were actually tickets just glued to a piece of paper. Which would be a much easier option but a big part of my work is spending time with these images.” The exhibition will consist of more than a dozen works from the series.
Dane Johnson’s work has long been influenced by chance especially the visual world around us. “We have so many pictures all around us and I have always tried my best to be engaged with my surroundings but there are things that get missed. Things like garbage on the ground, forgettable ad campaigns, magazines, newspapers etc. Those images can have just as much meaning as a slick Nike ad or a show at MOCA…They just need to be considered differently, or just considered period. I try to reframe the way some of these things are looked at.” Johnson continues, “There is so much that you can possibly see, everything there is to see, so it becomes about curating your surroundings. Seeking things out. Putting yourself into positions where you are making connections to what you are looking at. Sometimes it is successful and sometimes it fails but it is the engagement in the surroundings that is interesting to me.”
Posted By The Citrus Report
