Andrew Ellis Johnson

Andrew Ellis Johnson’s exhibition topics have ranged from the apocalypse to animal nature and disasters of war to the culture of class. Venues for his work have included museums, galleries, electronic arts and video festivals, public collaborations, conferences, books and journals in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He is Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Scribbles is a series of digital collages that deals with missing information, an elision in both subject matter (bones absent flesh) and execution, as the bones form the basis of an absent Islamic pattern. The implied spatial relationships are contradicted in part by the varying scale of the bones that are woven. Like yanking a cloth from a laden table and leaving the plate settings intact, removing the underlying template leaves the bones aligned to a design that is no longer seen directly. The remaining tracery of this impossible skeletal structure alludes to a vanished whole. The viewer glimpses an unattainable perfection that only exists in memory. 

Andrew Ellis Johnson - scribbles