Please Note: This exhibition is on view by appointment only, to schedule a viewing, please call (416)532-5566, or send an email to info@cuttsgallery.com
Rae Johnson: Angels and Monsters – a selection of paintings from 1979 to 2019
Angels and Monsters is a survey of paintings starting with the 1979 New York paintings, through the 1980’s, landing in 2017 with my last exhibition at the Christopher Cutts Gallery. This exhibition represents some of the key figurative work over the nearly 40 years I have been painting, leaving my landscape work for another exhibition planned in the fall of 2020 with Cutts’ Gallery. To give an historical context to the work it needs to be noted that the art world was undergoing a revolution, overturning the supremacy of abstraction by New Image Painting. The new painting was an international phenomenon abandoning realism for a kind of expressionism that embraced permissions given by conceptual and pop art.
The title of the exhibition Angels and Monsters was chosen because my early work started with my interest in exploring images and symbols, seeing them through the contemporary female experience. I was especially interested in how feminine archetypes have appeared and been depicted historically and in the contemporary world. Another topic was the sexual exploitation of women, specifically from the female gaze and from my own experience as a young woman artist coming of age in the 60’s and 70’s. The Monsters were an illustration of the fear of male violence in our culture often viewed as entertainment in all forms of media. The Angels refer to images of the divine that I borrowed from the Renaissance because they are universally understood in our Western civilization. Sometimes I would deliberately combine images of the profane with the “sacred.” These paintings are meant to connect contemporary experience with our unconscious inklings of a spiritual dimension that exists below our mundane everyday life.
When I started this work I was studying in New York with the OCA off campus program. I was disgusted and fascinated by the vastness of the pornographic industry. I would find images in magazines on 42nd street which was the go-to area to find live peepshows, live sex acts, pornographic videos and publications. I wanted to remake the images I found, my research was not a celebration of it, but rather my attempt to express the horror of these acts of dehumanization where the spirit was detached from the body. At the time the work was misunderstood. I saw the people in pornography as disposable human beings used for amusement in an endemic commercial enterprise – hidden from view but nonetheless everywhere. This was the end of the 1970’s and at the time no one could have predicted the normalization of pornography on the internet and into our very understanding of sexuality itself.
When I graduated from OCA (OCADU now) my New York paintings were shown at the 1980 open house. The police and the Morality Squad threatened to close the exhibition after receiving complaints from the public. In a brave move the college and their legal team defended my work and the work of another student, John Brown. A compromise was reached. Warning signs were posted advising parental guidance before entering the floor where the work was displayed. The Globe and Mail newspaper reported on the story and my career was launched. The controversy followed me throughout my career. Over the years my work has continued to seek the boundary of where art meets the conventions of acceptable subject matter – whether to critique social norms or through revisiting the often maligned genre of Canadian landscape painting. There will be a public lecture on my life and work at the Ontario College of Art and Design University on April 2nd 2020. The speaker will be Dr. Hugh Alcock PhD in philosophy who has written a book that takes an in-depth look into my collective projects as well as providing a context for my many explorations into style and content during my 40 year career. More details about time and place will be provided soon.
