Tim Johnson in 2024

(Heliocentric) Visions
26.07. - 17.08.2024

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(Heliocentric) Visions is a special retrospective of Tim Johnson’s illustrious oeuvre and representational evolution as a leading Australian artist at the forefront of contemporary art since the 1970s. Working across an extensive range of media encompassing performance art, live music, photography and painting, Johnson serves as a significant figurehead in the debate of postmodern cross-cultural referencing through his process of intellectual involvement, collective dialogue and collaboration with artists from different cultural and religious traditions.

On his solo presentation, the artist says: “(Heliocentric) Visions covers the progress of my work from the 1970’s through to the present, exploring specific areas of study that had an influence on my practice. Painting again after an era of conceptual and performance art meant that imagery became like a language, and painting became like a performance. I abandoned the notion of a coherent visual statement and preferred instead to accumulate signifiers of events that I thought could be perceived as art. I saw them as part of a visual language that was more like a non-linear text or a poem than a painting.

When Punk and New Wave music arrived in the late 1970’s, one of the central ideas was that anyone could do it. This shift in popular culture greatly influenced my artistic aims as I sought to create paintings that were not elitist but instead dealt with social issues. I documented punk music with photographs and super8 movies and used this in its original form as artworks.

At the end of the 1970’s, I started collecting paintings from Papunya Tula in the Western Desert. This led to many visits to Papunya, the Aboriginal settlement in Central Australia, where the “dot” style of painting was developing. At that time, it was relatively unknown. Now it is internationally recognised. With permission, I documented my experiences with photographs and used this as source material for my own paintings. Through my early time at Papunya, I was assigned a skin name, ‘Tjapaltjari’, making me brother to both Tim Leura and Clifford Possum, who consented on my ability to paint and collaborate on certain stories. My use of dots also had a wider context that included pointillism, benday dots and digital imagery, as well as pop art and cubism.

Next, I started to study and practice Buddhism through Tibetan Buddhists who were offering teachings to Westerners. My interest in Tibetan thangka painting blossomed and, when I asked about using the imagery in my own work, the Lama answered: “it’s your practice.” In other words, they wanted my art to be influenced by Buddhism. There are a wealth of ideas in Buddhist art through which I began to explore its imagery, styles and concepts. Most important to me was the “Pure Land” – a pristine world that was the abode of the deity – and the idea of Mt Meru as the metaphysical centre of the universe.

Several other cultural phenomena became obsessions over the years, including the 19th century Symbolist poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Blues music from the USA, and the Beat generation where alienation, poetry and Buddhism helped develop the notion of counterculture. I also became interested in Ufology when a friend told me about a UFO he had seen in Annandale. I didn’t believe him until I read someone else’s account of the exact same sighting published in a British UFO magazine. I studied ufology and found that extra-terrestrials were present in the creation mythology of many different cultures. Even stories from Papunya had “starmen” coming to earth to teach the Law. I began to include UFO imagery in my work as well as the ideas it offered, one of which was that the universe or the cosmos could become a context for making art.”