High on mock-plinths, fabricated femininity displays itself in The Trophies. In their late teens or early twenties (N.B., they are contemporaries of the artist’s mother, and two are the artist's mother), these young women pose for the camera’s gendered eye in attitudes meant to mark the boundaries of the female domain. Collected during the pandemic on eBay, salvaged trophies are photographically documented and distorted to which Johnson digitally marries fragments from a cache of unpublished and long-forgotten negatives from 1950s fashion shoots. This becomes a kind of self-portraiture, a fictional autobiography told through reimagined familiar things.
The Trophies (2021 -)