News Archives - 2007

Augsburg College presents local painter Adam Paul Johnson in "From a Parallel Place," the current exhibit in the Christensen Center Art Gallery running from May 18 - July 1 .

The Opening Reception is Friday, May 18, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. and the Artist Gallery Talk is Monday, June 11 at noon.

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What does it mean to live one place but to be rooted in another? How does someone present that mental and physical disjunction in visual terms? Johnson has been a part of the Midwestern landscape for over a decade (he received his graduate degree from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and he continues to teach there), but until recently the "place" pictured in his canvases has been the Western landscape of his childhood, specifically a four-mile stretch of Highway One near Moss Landing, California.

Johnson has uprooted himself in this newest body of work. But his bird’s-eye views underscore the sense that places, even the ones that immediately surround you, do not exist without someone envisioning their existence. And that envisioning takes many forms — part lived and part learned second-hand, part empirical and part abstract.  To this end Johnson draws from a range of sources, his own photos, old newspapers, and government brochures, interpreting the land not on its own terms, but its associative ones.

All events are free and open to the public.

For more information on The Christensen Center Gallery click here.

Image: "Monument to East-West," 2007, oil and acrylic on canvas, 38" x 35"