Artist Jess Johnson walked barefoot in the sand to grade school in a bucolic seaside town in New Zealand — widely considered one of the world’s most ruggedly beautiful countries — and has lived or had residencies in New York City, Berlin, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia. Her favorite place she has lived? Roswell, where she recently spent a year in the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. That alone is compelling evidence that her perspective differs markedly from most people’s, but she says she feels activated by the desert.
Johnson has brought that unpredictable outlook to Santa Fe in the form of Necro Techno Flesh Complex , a multimedia room at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return that opens Friday, August 16. It’s on the surreal side even by Meow Wolf standards, a mix of swirling designs surrounding an unexpected centerpiece. “So there’s this central well that has a dome on it, with this full-dome movie projected into its interior,” she told Pasatiempo in April during an interview at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program compound.
“It’s all decorated with mosaics, and then there are ceramic tiles on the floor. And then there are these relief columns I’ve been getting made, which were going to be carved by hand and from polystyrene and then coated with resin and painted.” Johnson is both a world traveler and a world builder, drawing what she describes as an increasingly complicated fictional realm that includes alien symbology.