10/03/2026
"COLLECTive Concerns" — The Voices Behind the Art
Sue Johnson | Richmond, Virginia
"'The Hall of Portraits from The History of Machines' imagines a future-past in which cyborgian women populate the event horizon - a point of no return.
Works construct a disquieting satire that proposes an alternative pictorial history in which two objects of desire become one: the household convenience object and the modern New Woman. Seeking an origin story, the project looks back to 20t-century consumer culture when women were openly idealized as sharing attributes with objects of domestic convenience, efficiency, and planned obsolescence.
My research-based project mines the archive of material culture from advertising to the manufactured objects themselves, creating surreal images for contemplation in which labor-saving domestic machines merge with the body or vice versa. Like artifacts from a cabinet of curiosities come alive, the painted and digitally stitched-together hybrid women challenge the logic of rigid, outmoded classification systems that separated the realms of the artificial and natural. Taken together, these images complete an implied narrative arc in which women are and have been constructed to be both consumers and the consumed at the same time.
My artwork and multimedia installations are revisionist in method, creating plausible fictions that run both parallel and counter to canonical histories. Projects focus on topics that include the origins of museums, cabinets of curiosities and "lost" collections, the picturing of nature and women, the domestic universe and consumer culture. Collectively, they defy easy categorization."
"COLLECTive Concerns" is on view at Piedmont Arts through Oct. 31. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Admission free.
