ABOUT THE ARTIST

After many years as a painter,

American artist Shawn Ketchum Johnson focused his creative endeavors on design for live performance and architecture for audience experience.  Recently, seeking a way back to one-on-one, object-based viewership from the world of live audiences, he turned back to a much older creative activity: photography.

 
Though Shawn’s history with photography is complicated — having at times put it aside entirely out of experiential distrust — it has long been an important creative outlet.  And in looking for a new way to connect as a visual artist with viewers, using the lessons learned from experience design, photography has coalesced for him into a meaningful practice with deep, communicative clarity.

This current work finds its strength in its meditative mission.  Observant to the point of distraction, Shawn lives largely unable to filter out the minute details of his surroundings.  In earlier days, he used his camera to simply document the minutiae that others failed to notice, to carry it into their experience and enrich their worldview.  Now, however, each photograph captures a process — not a documentation of something noticed by the photographer, but a conversation between he and a viewer about why he noticed it in the first place, why it bears noticing, and an approximation of how it felt to sit with and appreciate it.  

Images, like words, are imprecise communicators.  In this new work, Shawn has found a way as an artist to sit quietly with you, the viewer, and exchange interpretations about experience.  Each piece is a conversation — one he can’t wait to have with you.