Into the Wood

Jay Johnson has a reputation. Two, actually. He is known as a sculptor of consummate craftsmanship whose work in wood is refined, elegant, quirky and poignant. He is also notorious within the San Diego art scene, where he has played a formative role for nearly 20 years, for his insistent frankness. He says what he thinks, however impolitic or ungracious.

The work and the character are both driven by the same instincts, says Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and co-curator of Johnson’s mid-career survey, currently on view at the museum’s downtown space.

“His personality is in the work, the compulsiveness in the craftsmanship and the disarming directness,” Davies says. He’s quite genuine and forthright. I think the work is unguarded in the same way.”

The painted sculptures gathered for the show, “Look In Out 1984-1997,” cover a period during which Johnson’s work has revealed more and more of himself.

“The work is increasingly autobiographical,” Davies says. “It’s more overtly personal than it was 10 years ago, and it’s better for it.”

“NRNRNA (for Louise)” was a seminal work in Johnson’s shift toward more intimate content and figurative form. Its 120 turned-wood shapes, resting in orderly fashion on shelves in a broad, multi-part cabinet, resemble vases and bottles. Some are graceful, others clunky; some are staid and traditional in shape, others have a mod feel dating to the era of the lava lamp.

Johnson dedicated the work to his mother, having made the individual components in the late 1980s, when he returned to his childhood home in Marin County to care for her in her final years. Needing a break, away from the house, he took night classes, learning to turn wood on a lathe. When he finished another in his endless series of vessel-like shapes, he would bring it back home to amuse his mother, who collected odd objects and antiques and was the instigator of ambitious family art projects when Johnson was a boy.

“That piece was about people and personalities, how we’re all different but all the same,” Johnson says of “NRNRNA,” after first unloading a list of grievances and insecurities about how late and how little local museums recognize local artists. “We’re all the same size but different shapes and colors. It’s sort of a figurative piece.”

Sturdily built, with close-cropped hair and characteristically disarming blue eyes, Johnson, 42, pauses for a cigarette outside his studio in the rocky hills of Lakeside, a rural suburb east of San Diego, a few weeks before the opening of his show. Roosters sound in the distance, a neighbor’s cow lows, and Johnson’s caramel-colored standard poodle, named Louise after his mother, nuzzles against his legs.

After completing “NRNRNA” in 1992, Johnson turned to the human figure, joining tapered wood cylinders and dowels to make a sympathetic sort of Everyman, without individual features but prone to the searing extremes of human emotion. The most recent work in the museum show is a series of 26 marionette-like figures--some as small as 6 or 7 inches--in a panoply of situations, embodying a range of universal human conditions: insecurity, exhaustion, wonder, courage, confusion. All are wall-mounted and made of wood; some parts are sheathed in copper, others painted in primary colors or black.

“Task” has the little man pushing a scraggly ball of thread up a slanted plank in Sisyphean futility. In “One Morning,” the figure, raw wood but for the label “42 YEARS” painted across his chest, faces his own mortality in the bathroom mirror. In others, a lone rower seems to paddle vigorously across the gallery wall and a sleepwalker (protected by a safety chain) is about to step off the top stair into the abyss.

Accessible through their narrative suggestion and meticulously crafted, the new works draw from both the abbreviated beauty of Brancusi and the raw vitality of Assemblage, which made a strong impression on Johnson as a child. Johnson himself worried that these “sketches” might seem too light-hearted and whimsical to cap off his first one-person museum show.

Davies, who organized the current show with curator Elizabeth Armstrong, has followed Johnson’s career since joining the Museum of Contemporary Art 14 years ago and finds the artist’s insecurity “endearing.” Seeing the small figurative works in progress in the artist’s studio, Davies was impressed.

“They seem playful because they’re diminutive and toylike,” he says. “But the actions they’re engaged in are anything but childlike. They’re poignant. These works are like aphorisms. They all seem to have a little lesson behind them, a point.”

Johnson’s earliest works in the show are wall-mounted as well but far more abstract.

“It started out flat,” he says of his mid-’80s work, “then became more dimensional. They were streamlined, elegant, pointy things with high finish. Not a fetish deal but clean lines, nonobjective.”

Alternately brash and vulnerable, Johnson repeats that he is not one to analyze his own work. Yet in looking over the two decades that he has been making art, he correlates shifts in his work to the phases in his emotional life.

“When I have quiet periods in my life and everything’s stable, the work just becomes elegant and ambiguous,” he says. Then, faced with a personal crisis or simply when a nice color or shape are no longer enough, he looks to infuse some meaning.

The “formalist, absence-of-content work” harks back to his early years working in ceramics, when the emphasis was on throwing the perfect pot. Johnson became interested in clay while in high school in the Bay Area.

“I was always in two different worlds,” he remembers. “I was sort of a jock, on the swimming team, but I took a class and fell in love with pottery.”

After graduation, he followed his friends on the swim and water polo teams, who went down south for the warm-water surfing, and enrolled at San Diego State University. He worked in a production pottery studio for several years while in school, but the macrame planter phase passed and Johnson too lost his enchantment with ceramics. He had been fabricating wooden armatures to support his ceramic sculptures and ultimately phased out clay entirely to work with wood.

To pay the bills, Johnson turned to construction work, which he still does sporadically. Lured downtown for a rehab job in 1979, Johnson was seduced by the abandoned warehouses and vacant storefronts of pre-redevelopment San Diego, and in 1980 he moved from his studio at the beach. He took occupancy of a former pawn shop, which he converted into a studio for his own use as well as a gallery--the Pawn Shop--to exhibit the work of others.

Within a few years, the forces of gentrification pressured him--along with the topless bars and porno shops--out of the area and he opened Pawn Shop 2 further downtown, with then-girlfriend Patty Aande. There, they showed work by rising L.A. stars Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman and Roger Herman and were instrumental in developing the critical mass that energized San Diego’s downtown art scene in the 1980s.

Johnson, however, was getting frustrated and bitter about the dearth of local collectors--a recurring theme in his conversations still--and when he and Aande split, she carried on the gallery under her own name and he moved into a nearby studio to concentrate on his own work. He stayed downtown for the next 10 years, incorporating words, painted images, globes and cabinet-like structures into his work, which has been exhibited regularly throughout the Southwest.

Upscale Italian restaurants, cigar bars and nightclubs settled onto 5th Avenue, whereJohnson had opened the first Pawn Shop gallery, but revitalization efforts hadn’t done much for the neighborhood around his studio, so in 1993 he bought the house in Lakeside, a 30-minute drive east. He lives there with his girlfriend Meg Gehres, four cats and the dog and an amusing menagerie of lawn ornaments. A defunct granite quarry behind his house has started to call to him, and he is musing over the idea of working with stone and metal, “the classic materials.”

Being ensconced in an area he calls “too white and too hot” reinforces Johnson’s reputation as a curmudgeon and the corollary notion that his work is more sophisticated than he is. Davies has nothing but praise for the sustained conceptual rigor of Johnson’s work and the under-recognized richness of his personality.

“He has an affect of being not terribly polished or well-read, but in fact, he’s very well rounded in terms of his experience of the world, his knowledge of people. He’s engaged with the world in a very full way.”

*

“JAY JOHNSON: LOOK IN OUT 1984-1997 / PAINTED SCULPTURES,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, downtown space, 1001 Kettner Blvd. (at Broadway). Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Ends Sept. 14. Prices: Adults, $4; senior citizens, students and military, $2. Phone: (619) 234-1001.