RSM Art Gallery Exhibit: A River Twice - Painting by Bradford Johnson Opens January 25
January 18, 2023
A River Twice
Painting by Bradford Johnson
January 25 - February 26, 2023
Artist's website
Artist Talk & Opening Reception
Wednesday, January 25 at 5:00 p.m., Opening reception to follow
View the Recorded Artist Talk
The RSM Gallery is proud to premiere paintings from A River Twice, a ten-year project responding to the Massachusetts Mystic River Landscape that Bradford Johnson began in 2020 and will complete in 2030. The artist’s paintings wrestle with the anxiety that many of us feel living in the Anthropocene. Today we are flooded with artistic and documentary works showing the devastation that humans have inflicted on the environment. They are all about endings: extinction, apocalypse, collapse. Johnson’s work takes a longer view. He revisits landscapes that have been continuously altered by humans over decades, even centuries, and shows the surprising ways in which they continue to evolve. He unearths multiple layers of human engagement with a place, from consumption and trade to myth, ritual, and restoration. Johnson’s artwork incorporates site visits with photographs and archival documents acknowledging Anthropogenic ecological damage, while testifying to the habitat rehabilitation work of scientists and activists. In this process, he forces us to imagine humans not only as agents of destruction, but also of renewal.