Mariah Anne  Johnson

We Are All Well and Fine

drawings and installation

June 14-July8,2008

Artist Opening Reception  Saturday:June 8^th,7:00-10:00pm

LittleBird Gallery is thrilled to announce a new exhibition by artist,

Mariah Anne Johnson. A recent transpant to the Los Angeles area from Arkansas.

“We Are All Well and Fine” marks her first solo show in Los Angeles. Using such  mediums as drawings, paintings and an installation made from fabrics. Johnson’s work and ideas stem from her upbringing in the South. A culture that is focused on the past and family histories.Preserved in a collective memory of language,objects and gestures. Her work with bed sheets grew out of Mariah’s thinking about her mother’s efforts at maintaining aesthetic order in the home: she wants her linen closet to be beautiful, even when the rest of the house is not. With her mother’s habits in mind, Johnson folds, wraps, and piles  bed sheets and pillowcases, which she finds in thrift shops, into sculptures and installations. The interactions among color combinations, printed patterns, and folding systems become visually engrossing and reference brushstrokes and abstract paintings. The materials carry with them a lost history of the bodies and lives of their previous owners. The sheets become the material for pieced together, re-imagined narratives.

Mariah Johnson  is a gradutate of Rice University and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois. She lives and works in Los Angeles CA.