In 2022 I was invited to participate, with Pip Adam, in a kōrero for a project called ‘ĀPŌPŌ / TOMORROW’, edited by Michelle Elvy and Witi Ihimaera. Our prompt was ‘Wetewete Te Wheke / Release the Taniwha’.
My imagination was immediately sparked by this project. I am primarily an artist with a bad habit of writing too much about art and perception. ‘Release the Taniwha’ is exactly what I am trying to do, reinterpreting how we see and hoping for a more symbiotic world where we can coexist. The goal is to release humanity from the obsession with objective identity and ‘truth’, which is actually fabricated and purely metaphorical. The Taniwha, to me, is a mystical force that could free us from rationalism and the idea of ‘knowing’.
I became fascinated with the long-fin eels in New Zealand, who apparently live to 106 years and only procreate at the end of their life, once. I associate them with the Taniwha, seeing imagination as an evolutionary impulse. I believe they are endangered because of dam building. So much of our world needs to be appreciated in its entirety instead of selfish human needs.
This project also came at the darkest time in my life. In August 2021 my mother died and by November 2021 I discovered that five horses had taken up residence in my studio, which I built on her property in South Africa. I had moved to Toronto in 2005 and couldn’t afford to transport and store all the kinetic sculptures and art, so I had stored about 20-odd years’ worth of art and records. Everything was thrown away so stables could be constructed. I felt like a dead man!
AJ-SA Studio2021 (image credit: Brittany Dötterbeck)
The kōrero was a breath of life for me. Initially Pip and I met over Zoom and discussed creating a fictional response. I read her book, The New Animals, to get a sense of her mindset while she read my essay ‘Conjuring the Chimera’ which was adjunct with the theme ‘Release the Taniwha’. I realized that writing fiction wasn’t coming naturally to me and gravitated back to essay writing.
One odd synchronicity was the name of a dog in Pip’s book. He was called ‘Doug’ but this had reverted to ‘Dog’, which was my name for a deceased friend, Douglas Wood. He was the son of missionaries from Michigan and the ‘black sheep’ of the family because he was an atheist. Unfortunately, he got intestinal cancer that had to be removed, leaving him with an impaired capacity to eat. A single hamburger could last a couple of days. His company had disability insurance, so he could travel a bit and tour the art museums in the States. He was very emaciated but at least free.
After a year or so he came back to South Africa and it was clear that he hadn’t long to live. He was admitted to hospital in Johannesburg and I would visit him on Saturdays to talk philosophically about life and death, while he deliberated over his beliefs. Finally, he announced he had solved the problem and knew he was going to become a spaceman when he died.
With death imminent, his family in the US became panic-stricken and pressured him to seek treatment in the US. They put him on a plane and he died in-flight. Struck by the poeticism that he had succeeded in becoming a spaceman of sorts, I made a painting, “Metamorphosis: Doug Shoots Thru”.
Metamorphosis: Doug Shoots Thru
I struggled to get going with the project because I had been placed in a 6-week physio program for arthritis. It destroyed my concentration and is actually a bad idea since exercising inflamed joints just makes the inflammation worse. Later on, I discovered a solution was supplementing really high dose Vitamin D3 of 50000iu daily with Vitamin K2 600mcg and Magnesium 400mg taken with fatty foods like cheese. Apparently D3 is not a vitamin but a secosteroid hormone produced in the skin, switching things on and off, so it can stop cortisol flooding the cells.1 I have regained most of my lost mobility and can run and dance again.
During this period I sent an essay ‘Looking for Boas in the Mangroves’ to Pip. She inserted her fiction into the paragraphs and we indented the two pieces differently so they coexisted symbiotically. Pip introduced the forest and ideas of communication between trees, which I valued greatly. It’s so important to realize that humans only live by virtue of symbiosis and communication. Our ‘selves’ are constructs and the mitochondria that generate our energy are plant-like organisms. Our gut flora also keeps us alive and healthy.
AJ-Looking4Boas
At some point in our conversation Pip wondered whether an artist could contribute to our understanding like science and philosophy. I mused on this and began to formulate a way of challenging our assumptions about Classical perception garnered from Descartes and Newton.
Finally, I wrote an essay titled ‘The Resurrection of Looking’. In this essay I considered the habituations of visual perception that define our way of looking. I demonstrated through dot illusions that show we both add and subtract content based on what we think should be visible. Illusions are not aberrations of vision but the primary and ingenious way we allow guesswork to happen. Perception is based on uncertainty and guesses, marshalled by our consciousness, which acts to inhibit and order imagination.
Dot Illusion 1 Scintillating Grid
Dot Illusion 2 Extinction Illusion
I created abstract paintings to illustrate my theory, treating intuition as a habituation rather than something linked to ‘inner truth’. I use ambiguity and contradiction as preconditions for the choice of mark making. The final paintings are spatial explorations with an active component so as the viewer’s eye passes over an area the content flips. Thus the painting is like a wave.
Quantum Looking Measured
Quantum Looking Flexible
Quantum Looking Ambiguous and Contradictory
Quantum Looking Deserted
At this point the book became A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru taha, an anthology of new writing for a changed world. I joined the two essays and Pip’s writing using my poem called ‘Uno?!?’, which means One and You Know?!?, like cartilage since Pip’s piece ended in onomatopoeia and the poem complemented this, formulated in ‘meaningless words’ from multiple languages. The poem also looks like a tree.
Despite some of the trials over the process of publishing I value this experience and feel that it will lead to further explorations on my part both in writing and art. I think our current civilization is desperately in need of an overhaul and I hope our contributions in this kōrero can be meaningful in the wider context as well. Thank you, Michelle, Witi and Pip, for the experience!!
Footnote: 1 See Elsevier research https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30611908/
Ashley Johnson is a Toronto artist, originally from South Africa. His art promotes a symbiotic relationship between humanity and the environment. His metaphorical paintings explore socio-environmental issues like the state of the ocean. The identity of forms is ‘loosened’ through overlays and omissions to generate an uncertain perception. This creates a zone for viewers to re-imagine existence. He says: “We need to reappraise our animal nature and our relationship to the land. A key tool for this is the virility of perception. We project what we think we see, so we need to seed this possibility with fresh vision.”