Bradford Johnson

Three dates

• 11Fri Sept

  Opening reception

  5:00 to 9:00 pm

• 19Sat Sept

  Artist talk

  4:30 to 6:30 pm

  Bradford in conversation with the artist and author Sara Hendren, on archives, patterned rooms, and how these paintings get made.

• 2Fri Oct

  Closing reception

  6:00 to 8:00 pm

  First Friday in SoWa. The last evening of the show.

The seeds

Each painting begins with a patterned wall. Once the panels are built, a search starts through photographic archives for a figure to set into the middle of it, someone rooted in that place and time but coincident in ours. Here are a few of the seeds that propagated this work.

• 1864

  Good Friday. The Petersen boarding house parlor, Washington DC. Mary Todd Lincoln. An unknown woman in a Union Army camp. Pressed Easter lilies under glass.

• 1937

  The newly completed chancel of Trinity Church, Boston. Wayfaring strangers. Dorothea Lange. A Dust Bowl migrant.

• 1969

  A guest bedroom. The Amazon rain forest. Indigenous contact, and an evangelical missionary.

• 1970

  A Scottish Georgian manor house. The novel War in Heaven. A boy Inkling and his father. Roses as symbols.

• 1877

  A balcony in Trinity Church, Boston. The Gilded Age, social class, a need for belonging, and the advantage of anonymity.

Brian Eno calls this the long now: a recognition that the precise moment you are in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.

In the show

Visiting