Erin Johnson Survey at UGA Athenaeum Blends Ecology, Science, and Film

A Survey of Interconnectedness

Erin Johnson’s survey “The Measure Is Something Else,” on view at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum in Athens, brings together a body of essay films that render the world sensorial and strange rather than didactically demystifying it. The exhibition title comes from a letter Rachel Carson wrote to her lover, Dorothy Freeman, while dying of cancer, about monarch migration. Carson observed that the butterflies’ lifespan seemed short but understood that the measure is something else from their perspective. This ethos of shifting perspective runs through Johnson’s work.

Heavy Water: Feral Dogs and Nuclear Weapons

In Johnson’s two-channel film Heavy Water (2018), a mustachioed man, ecologist L. Lehr Brisbin, asks who first domesticated dogs, warning “They could grow up to eat your children.” The film cuts to a hand hovering over a slide projector displaying cheap land in South Carolina where nuclear weapons were developed during the Cold War. In the 1970s, Brisbin noticed “unusual dogs with strange behavior” on this lot: gingerish, Dingo-like, feral, rare. He says these Carolina Dogs have no European DNA and that he started noticing their likeness in cave paintings, suggesting they may have been in the Carolinas for thousands of years. After environmentalists advocated for protecting these unique creatures, nuclear-weapons manufacturing on their site was halted. Then scientists found several federally endangered species—birds and plants—thriving in the area humans had cordoned off. As the film comes full circle, our apocalyptic future mingles with our ancient past.

Erin Johnson’s films enlist science not to close down mystery but to open it wider, rendering the world sensorial and strange.

Sonic Textures and Plant Research

A voice-over reads from Carson’s letters in There Are Things in This World that Are Yet to Be Named (2020), the film unfolding in sonic textures. Lines are chanted almost musically, repeating the refrain “there are so many things yet to be named” until its enthusiastic sense of wonder radiates. Meanwhile, botanists in a greenhouse reflect on how binary, unscientific thinking about gender brought unhelpful bias into plant classifications, occluding understanding of the more marvelous ways plants reproduce. Their lab’s research on a certain bush tomato exploded understandings of sexual normativity.

Filmmaking as a Collective Effort

When Johnson’s credits roll, it’s a veritable list of art stars: contributions by Nikita Gale, Farah Al Qasimi, Sondra Perry. Filmmaking takes a village, and Johnson relies on friends. This ethos is made visible in Tomatoes (2020) and Oranges (2023), where friends from the credits appear onscreen. A camera scans her Skowhegan cohort seated in a circle as they eat tomatoes in a field; in another, oranges on a roof. You’re left watching people—Tomashi Jackson, Annika Todd, Chase Hall—just eating, and it feels surprisingly intimate, both sensual and silly as they slurp juices and spheres.

Queer History and Oceanic Depth

In To Be Sound Is To Be Solid (2022), we watch the artist talk on the phone to a scientist whose work involves mapping the bottom of the ocean floor. Meanwhile, Johnson imagines the lives of the two women who built the Sea Ranch house she is renting—a midcentury marvel with fresh flowers, crisp bedding, and sleek bistro chairs. She finds hints that these women were a couple: They drafted, for instance, one version of the floor plan with just a single bedroom to share. Queer history can be like the ocean floor in that way: As the scientist relays, since hard data is too hard to come by, the best you can do is average the depth of an area around 200 meters by 200 meters.

Ecosystemic Thinking

Johnson trained at the alternative Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, where students farm the food, manage the land, and more. She also directs an artist-run space in New York named Winnie, after her dog, and does dog-rescuing work, organizing and collaborating in art and in life. The exhibition embodies ecosystemic thinking as much as it is “about” it. Such thinking posits that everything depends on and is connected to everything else, and there is no art form that relies on interdependence more than film. Johnson’s is that rare, rich breed of research-based art that lets you marvel at how big and strange the world is—at how deep the ocean might be.