14 – 22 April 2014
some girl who tells stories
some girl who tells stories (2012) is a bleak coming-of-age tale of a young woman described in breathless, autobiographical diaristic style.
“I work with what I know – with whatever literalness memory will allow, embracing neuroses and the damaged or doomed parts of the psyche. These are my stories.” Whitney Johnston.
Whitney Johnston is made up of: skeletal system, muscle, organs, fat, blood, fur, toxins. She grew up in New Orleans, received her BFA in Photography and Imaging from Tisch/NYU in 2012, and graduated with MFA in Film/Video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (as a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar and recipient of a New Artist Society Scholarship) in 2014.
“A performativity of girlhood, an articulation of struggle, a slap in the face, a flicker of life, betwixt and between vulnerability and control. I see life as an ongoing performance, figments of ideas of who we are and what our story will be. I approach my work as collections of materials—old and new, still and moving, my own and borrowed. Born out of a drive towards self-examination, these collections have become constructed worlds of ambiguity, visceral image and sound informed by fragmented and distorted memory, representations (not reconstructions) of the past. It is in this intersection of fact and fiction that I attempt to provoke viewers into participation: identification, presumption, implication… projection.” Whitney Johnston.