Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost: The Art of Jess Johnson
- October 12, 2025
- Liz Ohanesian
When I reached Jess Johnson by phone, the artist was at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where she was about midway through a six-month residency. In the studio Johnson draws, continuing to develop a sci-fi universe that has been growing for about eight years now.
Johnson’s universe is filled with intricate, near-hypnotizing patterns, bold colors, an array of symbols that recall ancient rituals, and a narrative that unfolds like a modern space fantasy saga. She does this in drawings that quite often resemble concert posters. Johnson, though, also works with collaborators, bringing her drawings into other realms, like virtual reality.
For several years, she has been working steadily with animator Simon Ward, who turns Johnson’s universe into virtual reality environments. At the moment, it’s a cross-global collaboration, as Ward is in New Zealand. But later on that week Johnson would also be in New Zealand for the opening of their collaborative VR experience and installation Terminus at Tauranga Art Gallery. She wasn’t planning to attend until an opportunity arose at the last minute. And it’s an important show. Tauranga is Johnson’s hometown. “It’s quite a special thing to get to return here and do an exhibition,” she says. “Growing up there were no art galleries in Tauranga.”
Johnson, who is currently based in New York, describes seaside Tauranga as “a very idyllic place to grow up,” but with a caveat. “You feel very, very far from the rest of the world, especially pre-internet.” In her youth, books and film sparked Johnson’s imagination. She read loads of science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as comics. She would go to the local video store and pick out unusual flicks to watch. Johnson describes her early influences as a “melting pot.” There were the illustrations on the covers of 1960s and ’70s sci-fi novels found at secondhand shops. She read Brian Aldiss, Ursula Le Guin, Iain Banks, Ray Bradbury, and Frank Herbert in her youth. Later on, Octavia Butler would become a favorite. For comics, she discovered underground artists like Robert Crumb and Mark Beyer.
At the video store, Johnson would find ’70s psychedelic movies like Fantastic Planet and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and indie films like Terry Zwigoff’s mid-’90s documentary, Crumb. In some cases, the media that Johnson consumed as a kid would go on to have a direct impact on her art. That’s the case in portions of Terminus, a five-part virtual reality project helmed by Johnson and Ward. Johnson notes that there’s a reference to The Neverending Story in the “Fleshold Crossing” section of Terminus and a nod to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in the “Tumblewych” portion of the experience. Elsewhere sci-fi, fantasy, comics, and film would go on to have a less obvious influence on her. “I think it influenced the work that I do now because I was always seeking these windows or portals into other universes and I guess that’s what I do in my own art practice,” she says. “I’ve been building this universe for eight years now. “
I stopped having to look outside the world too much for external imagery and I was constantly referencing back to earlier work this internal language built up.”
Johnson went to art school in New Zealand, but didn’t finish and says that, in some ways, her fine art career came later. “I was probably more involved in DIY spaces and the music scene,” she says. “I used to do artwork for friends’ gigs in music and stuff like that. I always really loved doing posters.”
While in her early twenties, Johnson moved to Australia and co-ran a DIY space, where she would draw posters for the events. After the venue closed, she took off time to develop her own art practice. “I had this year where I was really diligent and drew every day, locked myself in the studio,” she recalls, adding that there were “hints of the sci-fi world” in these drawings, but it had yet to take shape. Johnson describes these earlier drawings as “two-dimensional, flat, impenetrable masses of pattern.”
There’s not a lot of conscious decision-making going on with the drawings at all. They feel almost like they’re self-generative at this point.”
In time, her art universe evolved. First there was a horizon line. She started using a “Tron-type grid” that became part of the landscape. Then came architecture. After about three years of drawing, “the bodies started to appear.”
Johnson explains, “Once the bodies appeared, they started taking on these ritualistic scenes.” Soon, there were “alien deities” and a “social hierarchy” within the universe. She describes it as a process similar to building a stage set. “Once you create an environment, you start to populate it.” From there, “it just becomes richer and more complex the more you add to it.”
After about four or five years of drawing, Johnson noticed a shift in how she continued to build her universe. “I stopped having to look outside the world too much for external imagery and I was constantly referencing back to earlier work for this internal language built up,” she says. Once that happened, Johnson was able to draw without thinking too much about it.
“There’s not a lot of conscious decision-making going on with the drawings at all,” she says. “They feel almost like they’re self-generative at this point. Each drawing builds on the one before and it expands in that way.”
Johnson’s drawings may begin with the text or a singular image that has been on her mind. From there, other elements will take shape on the paper. She starts with some pencil, but will quickly move to pen, which Johnson says helps her to resist the urge to perfect the drawing. For color, she uses both paint pens and fiber-tip markers. She adds gouache for some figures and other elements at the end of the process.
Johnson had been building her world for about four years when she met Ward through a mutual friend. “We’ve got similar brains and approaches to work and we both had a lot of the same pop culture reference points, so there was an instant click,” she says. It didn’t take long for them to make their first collaborative piece, an animation called “Mnemonic Pulse.” The five-and-a-half minute clip gives viewers a peek into Johnson’s world in motion, traveling across a patterned landscape and through detail-heavy structures.
While they were working on “Mnemonic Pulse,” the buzz around virtual reality was rising with the release of Oculus Rift’s developer kit. They were able to secure funding for a kit and a computer and, a few months later, they had made a VR piece called “Ixian Gate,” which, like “Mnemonic Pulse,” references the Dune universe in its title.
Johnson and Ward were working in Melbourne at the time and had invited Australian curators to check out the project. “For a lot of them, this was their first experience with virtual reality,” Johnson recalls. “It’s quite a special thing to get to imprint your own artwork on someone’s first time of virtual reality.” A curator from National Gallery of Victoria was impressed with the work and that led to a commission from the gallery to finish the project for an exhibition. From there, the National Gallery of Australia took notice and commissioned Terminus, which took a year to complete.
I think that all of the mistakes and mutations that happen over the course of trying to work it out on the page, that allows the universe to grow.”
In addition to Ward, Johnson has been working with another creative collaborator. Her mom, Cynthia Johnson, has been making quilts based on Johnson’s drawings. “There’s not really a history of quilt-making in New Zealand,” says Johnson. But, her mom is from the U.S. and practiced this American craft while Johnson was growing up. As an adult, Johnson began to see the similarities between her mom’s work and her own. “That made me more aware that witnessing all of mum’s arrangements and all the pattern and quilt-making when I was growing up probably had a quite an influence on what I’m attracted to with my drawings,” she says. When they collaborate, Johnson has her art printed on fabric that she sends to her mom in New Zealand. “There’s a huge amount of labor that goes into each quilt. She works from six a.m. to late in the evening. She’s doing six days a week and each quilt was taking her about a month to do,” Johnson says. “She just makes them all on her domestic sewing machine.” Works from the collaboration will be part of Johnson’s solo show, Panspermia, Sing Omega, at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, scheduled for September 2019.
Johnson’s work has taken shape in multiple forms and with multiple collaborators and continues to expand. The organic flow of Johnson’s drawings and narrative is crucial to the development of the universe. “I think it’s really important for me to not plan the drawings too much,” says Johnson. “Otherwise, I’ll just be executing this fully formed image on the paper and I think that will kind of kill it in a way. I think that all of the mistakes and mutations that happen over the course of trying to work it out on the page, that allows the universe to grow.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 53, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing here!
Source involved in this report: Read Original Article
