The Traveler

Issue date: 4/16/08 Section: Life & Style

Media Credit: Irina Feofanova Tanya Johnston presents her MFA Thesis Exhibition "Meditative Spaces" from April 7 to April 18 in the AU Fine Arts Center Gallery.

In recreating memories, the introspective becomes concrete for master of fine arts candidate Tanya Johnston. Her thesis exhibit, "Meditative Spaces," is an invitation to step inside these memories and is on display until Friday in the Fine Arts Center Gallery.

With a mix of hand-crafted books, shadow boxes and a series paintings, the exhibit encompasses inner reflections on subjects that are personal for the artist and possibly for the viewer.

"My current body of work evokes memory and myth and the interaction between personal stories and a desire to link these personal elements into a shared human experience," Johnston said. "I have tried to create an introspective journey into my past and my family's past by alluding to highly personal situations and memories. While a viewer may only be able to guess the details of each story or memory shown, archetypical images, such as the birds, encourage the understanding of some aspects of the pieces on an intuitive level.

"Certain images have long histories in the human experience and, therefore, can be understood on an intuitive or primal level," she said. "Through a mix of personal and instinctual images, I am trying to achieve a balance between what is seen and understood and what is left to interpretation of the viewer."

The shadow boxes feature printed transparencies that are layered behind painted glass, allowing the individual images to coexist in an illusionary space.

"One of my major realizations has been that layers are extremely important in all of my work," Johnston said. "By analyzing past work, I realized that I have always been layering. I layered the paint. I layered the subjects in the paintings, and almost all of my paintings included looking through something. It was while working on a book that used transparency that I realized what I responded to most was not necessarily the subject, but the layers.

?"The memories presented are fragile, precious, fluid, and changing, and I have tried to show them as such," she said. "The elusiveness of truth and memory is shown in the layers of the work, particularly in the boxes," she said. "With every movement, the viewer's perspective into the boxes changes. The images, like truth, change and shift constantly."

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