RSM Gallery Artist Talk with Bradford Johnson: A River Twice - January 25, 2023

Paintings by Bradford Johnson

The RSM Gallery is proud to premiere paintings from A River Twice, a ten-year project responding to the Massachusetts Mystic River Landscape that Bradford Johnson began in 2020 and will complete in 2030. Johnson’s paintings wrestle with the anxiety that many of us feel living in the Anthropocene. Today we are flooded with artistic and documentary works showing the devastation that humans have inflicted on the environment. They are all about endings: extinction, apocalypse, collapse. Johnson’s work takes a longer view. He revisits landscapes that have been continuously altered by humans over decades, even centuries, and shows the surprising ways in which they continue to evolve. He unearths multiple layers of human engagement with a place, from consumption and trade to myth, ritual, and restoration. Johnson’s artwork incorporates site visits with photographs and archival documents acknowledging Anthropogenic ecological damage, while testifying to the habitat rehabilitation work of scientists and activists. In this process, he forces us to imagine humans not only as agents of destruction, but also of renewal.