Episode 2: Kristina Johnson
Episode two in our artist interview series features Minneapolis-based artist and gallery director, Kristina Johnson. Since taking over as the director of Waiting Room in 2019, KJ has curated several seasons of exhibitions that feature mainly emerging artists who deal with a varied range of conceptual concerns.
We met in her Minneapolis home / studio / gallery a few weeks after closing the last show in Waiting Room’s 2023 season – a solo show of her own most recent painting and sculptural work. Our conversation covered the challenge of the mental code-switching between curatorial and studio-oriented thinking, how her personal history informs her practice, and the complicated relationship she shares with Balthus’s work.
ON self-portraiture, intimacy, and being seen:
interview excerpt
Kristina Johnson: My mom has MS, and I've only ever known life with a disabled parent. And there was a time where that was not relatable to other people around me. So I felt that making work about it was the right thing to do.
Tessa Beck: It perhaps created a conversation you maybe weren’t able to have or access through other means.
KJ: Yes, or at least gave my mother some freedom to be able to talk with me about it in a way that felt more educational than emotional. I centered a lot of projects around her being able to take agency back from her disability – to help her open up to her family about it in a way that didn't feel so sad.
TMB: That approach also creates this really poignant archive of time. This is maybe a big generalization, but I feel like with any disability, and especially MS, the visibility of time on a disabled person’s body is more noticeable. If I were to put myself in your shoes, I feel like making an archive or record of time’s progression on your mother’s body would be so difficult yet enriching. Making a physical portrait of those changes versus relying on memory…
KJ: Totally. I did a full body cast of my mom in a wheelchair, and knowing how difficult it was for her physically participate in that way meant the world to me. And, you know the most important part of the project was that I just got to spend time with her. The project never needed to be anything more than that.
