October 19 – December 10, 2023
Artist Reception: October 21, 2023
Online Artist Talk: November 9, 2023, 7:00- 8:00 PM EST
Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography and video by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews. As we reveal Petal—a persona as whom Philip writes, and whom David photographs—the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances in domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the images and poems reveal surprising relationships between character, observer, and author. The photographs provide one record of Petal and Philip’s personalities, blurring art-historical feminine / masculine postures and gestures. The poems provide another which elaborates upon the lived experience of performing or, sometimes, obscuring or protecting the self from being seen. Thus, a continuous exchange between photographer and two subjects in one body reflects the complications of power and gender expression through the history of photography.
About the Collaborators
David Johnson is an artist, educator, and curator based in Conway, SC. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 and earned his BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography from Texas Christian University. In 2011, David was awarded the Great Rivers Visual Arts Award from the Gateway Foundation. This biennial award culminated with his 2012 exhibition institutional etiquette and strange overtones at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. Wig Heavier Than a Boot, a collaborative project with poet Philip Matthews, was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2019 and was featured at the Fotofest Biennial 2020 in Houston. The University of Texas Press published Johnson’s second book It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival in March of 2021.
Art Museum Saint Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, National Building Museum in Washington D.C. and Rathaus in Stuttgart, Germany. His work can be found in the collection at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Don’t Take Pictures, the Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, Photo-emphasis and Fraction Magazine have featured his work online. David has curated exhibitions for Center of Creative Arts, Paul Artspace and the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St Louis. Currently, Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Coastal Carolina University.
Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual, queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next.
Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action.
In two 6-month phases over the past three years, he returned to North Carolina to de-hoard his grandmother’s home and repair the physical and energetic infrastructures of a shared family place. This collaborative work with his mother has laid ground for new writing to take root.
He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.
