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, humanoid clones, and messianic figures.
She began working on the works in Necro Techno Flesh Complex a couple of months before moving to New Mexico. While her one-year residency in Roswell ended May 1, she’s returning to the city next year for an indefinite stay. She has visited Meow Wolf once, mostly collaborating remotely with the staffers who assembled pieces for the room, bringing her vision to life.
Necro Techno Flesh Complex opens at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return Friday, August 16. “It’s important to me that the human hand is still in the materials and the fabrication of the room,” she says. “I like that there are artists on the other side who are actually making stuff.
” That preference for a personal touch is evident, says exhibition manager Todd Zonderman. He mistakenly assumed at the beginning of the project that Johnson was mostly a digital artist. “What I discovered is that she starts by working on paper, by painting or drawing, and then moves on to digital,” he says.
“Sometimes digital work can feel a little flat, but because she has a really expansive process where she’s working by hand, I think her work has a lot of depth.” Johnson will be in New Mexico for several weeks before returning again in January for a longer stay. She’s set to deliver a talk and participate in a workshop September 28-29 at the House of Eternal Return; the times have yet to be finalized.
It will be a happy return. “I did a site visit when I first got here, and they took me through the big fabrication warehouse,” Johnson says. “Just seeing everyone’s workstations .
.. it’s just so streamlined and organized and warm.
I worked as an artist assistant. I always feel an affinity for the people who are actually making the stuff.” Johnson received an unexpected email from Meow Wolf in 2016 about contributing to a project, but the timing wasn’t right.
Her subsequent communication with director of artist collaboration Han Santana-Sayles offers clues about how Santana-Sayles’ job works. “She was very friendly,” Johnson says. “She would send messages on Instagram or comment and stuff like that.
I was trying to rent out my apartment in Auckland, New Zealand, to come to Roswell for a year, and I think she saw that and immediately sent me an email that said, ‘Oh, you’re going to be in New Mexico. Do you want to start chatting maybe about doing another project with us?’” Santana-Sayles says Johnson’s work feels like a “futuristic relic.” “She borrows symbols and patterning from various cultures freely, reimagining them in such a clear, illustrative way that it appears she is documenting a society that exists somewhere but we haven’t yet discovered it,” she says via email.
“The symbols are cryptic, some downright eerie, yet I find the overall tone of her work to often be humorous. In this installation, there is a clear nod to Greco-Roman architecture remixed from the perspective of an alien civilization.” Meow Wolf worked with a printer near Denver to fire-glaze or 3D-print elements of Necro Techno Flesh Complex .
“Some parts of the project, like the floor tiles, we were taking digital designs that she had done or hand drawings, then scanned them,” Zonderman says. “So we’ve got a combination of a very manual process and a very digital process that emerge in this really tactile space, which is a lot of fun when it works well. The columns were this kind of really fascinating combination of 3D printing, hand sculpting, and hand painting.
Jess and Simon had worked together on the digital 3D models for the columns.” The Simon whom Zonderman mentions is Johnson’s collaborator Simon Ward. Their previous projects include Terminus , described as a virtual reality experience in five parts; and XYZZY , a cinematic experience designed for planetariums.
Details are at jessjohnson.org . “All of the drawings get scanned, and then he translates them into the animations and video and VR stuff that we’ve done.
We have a very similar upbringing of growing up in a very small town in New Zealand. There was not a lot of exposure to creative things. I think I didn’t visit an art gallery until I was in my late teens or 20s.
You’re just very isolated from the rest of the world in New Zealand, which is good for the imagination, but ...
” Johnson trails off. Johnson grew up in Mount Maunganui, on the west side of New Zealand’s north island, one time zone west of the International Date Line. “We were right near the beach,” she says.
“The town had a primary school, and it didn’t have a playground. So every lunchtime, the teachers would take us over to the beach and we’d just make sandcastles and swim and hang out in the dunes. The parents would get pissed off that the kids kept losing their shoes in the sand, so the school just made a rule that you had to come to school barefoot.
” Johnson was school-aged when her talents began revealing themselves. “I think drawing was a way to focus my attention and calm my brain a little bit,” she says. “So I used to do that compulsively as a child; I would fill up a page with patterns and then turn it over and do the same on another page.
Any project I had to handle would have very intricate borders of illustrations and stuff like that. That’s been around forever.” Members of Meow Wolf’s exhibition and technical teams work seven days a week on the property.
Zonderman emphasizes that the digital elements of projects like Johnson’s still require plenty of human brains and brawn. “The digital technology, the 3D printing, the additive manufacturing or subtractive manufacturing technology, it doesn’t replace people, especially in design-driven fields,” he says. “We’re using 3D printers or laser cutters in much the same way that we were using analog tools or conventional machinery.
Jess Johnson’s room is a great example of how digital and human-crafted items get integrated.” Zonderman came to Meow Wolf about 18 months ago from Scotland — not Auckland — and says the House of Eternal Return plans to install two to four new artist commissions a year. So Johnson will have to enjoy the title of “newest artist featured at the House of Eternal Return” while she can.
She also will enjoy sticking around in a desert outpost that suits her sensibilities as an artist. “I never expected to feel like I found a home in Roswell,” Johnson says. “But I think I realized the space and this pace of life are kind of beautiful.
Previously, I’d always thought I had to be located in New York and places where there are career opportunities, but I don’t think that’s good for me, emotionally or psychologically. I feel a lot better in a place like this, where I’ve got space to think.”.
