HEAVY WATER
2018
Two-channel, 4K video installation
15 minute total running time
Commissioned by the Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA

Heavy Water​ investigates the social and political implications of South Carolina’s Savannah River Site (SRS), a U.S. nuclear weapons program facility and National Environmental Research Park. Johnson’s video and sound installation explores the relationship between SRS – a key disposition site for weapons-grade plutonium – and the free-ranging, wild dogs that live on the 310 square mile complex. Some ecologists suggest the dogs may be ancestors of the first dogs that entered North America more than 8,000 years ago, and in Johnson’s work this epic ancient timeline converges with another – that of the precarious, untenable future of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste.

SALIDAS Y ENTRADAS, EXITS AND ENTRANCES
2018
Three-channel, 4K video installation with sculptural seating
15 minutes total running time
Commissioned by the Rubin Center for the Arts, University of Texas, El Paso

For the three-channel video S​alidas y Entradas Exits and Entrances​ (2018), artists Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson worked with applied theatre facilitator Gina Sandi Diaz to offer performance workshops at public daytime senior centers managed by the city of El Paso’s Parks and Recreation Department. With the senior center as a stage, the elders who participated in the workshops enacted social, political and geographical imaginaries for the camera. Through improvisation and performance exercises drawn from the work of Viola Spolin and Augusto Boal, themes emerge: the dynamics of the U.S.- Mexico border, the desire to be seen, the role of musical storytelling as a soundtrack to daily life, power dynamics, and gender as performance. As the boundaries between rehearsal, improvisation, and performance blur, the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge together are foregrounded.

THE WAY THINGS CAN HAPPEN
2017
HD video
15 minute total running time

In​ The Way Things Can Happen​, extras from ​The Day After,​ a 1983 made-for-TV movie depicting a nuclear attack on Kansas, recollect their original scenes, now 34 years later. Having been filmed in the midst of the Cold War on location in Lawrence, Kansas and with a cast of five thousand locals, T​he Day After​ blurred the distinction between extras’ everyday existence and the movie and in doing so achieved the urgency and magnitude of live coverage of a national crisis - all with vast political and social implications. In their retelling of their scenes from The Day After,​ the extras omit references to the movie itself, further obfuscating the distinction between what happened in the film and in reality. A portrait of a city that once performed its own fictional destruction,​ The Way Things Can Happen​ queers time by stepping outside of linearity, creating a space for considering life where our country was destroyed by nuclear war and choosing a different path.

THE DOORS ARE NOW OPEN
2019
2K video
20 minute total running time

The Doors Are Now Open (2019) centers on a group of biologists studying solanum plastisexum, a species of tomato that has no stable sexual expression, and a group of artists as they use tomatoes as props for kinship and connection. Meditative sequences of scientists examining greenhouse plants converge with shots of artists eating, licking, and touching tomatoes and each other, as both groups sing lines from iconic LGBTQ films, research papers, and Erasmus Darwin’s 1789 epic poem The Loves of the Plants.

UNTITLED (FLOATING)
2019
4K video
10 minute total running time

A group of queer artists work to stay in a state of in-betweenness, together.