A Ghost of a Chance

The Shooting Gallery is pleased to present A Ghost of a Chance by SF-based artist Ian Johnson. The opening reception will be held at the Shooting Gallery on Saturday, August 17, 2013 from 7-11pm. The exhibit will be on display through September 7, 2013 and is free and open to the public.

Through its many permutations, from the Hot jazz Armstrong popularized in the 1920s to Bebop’s beginnings twenty years later to the improvisational styles of now, Jazz, it appears, will be timeless. Focusing on musicians from the late 1940s through the 60s, a turbulent stretch of time for America, Ian Johnson’s reverence for the complex history of the musical style is underscored by his interest in both the big names and the lesser known figures. Many of whom performed at venues where they could not stay as guests, a mark of the barriers Jazz endured and eventually broke through.

With A Ghost of a Chane, Johnson delivers finely rendered portraits of jazz legends alongside more minimal graphics, with multiple paintings featuring the outline of a face filled in with myriad types of patterning. In these paintings, familiar forms are reduced to brightly hued geometric shapes amid solid backgrounds. At once identifiable and yet abstracted, Johnson’s outlines read as a lasting imprint of a bygone star. In his more conventional portraits, Johnson paints from old photographs, replicating the distinctly soft shades of black and white, reflecting his intent to portray the figures as “stuck in time,” memorializing the photos they’ve left behind and allowing “the patterns and color to reference the music they made, still vibrant and resonating today.”

Johnson’s color sense and energetic compositions assume a visual equivalent of syncopation, with unexpected rhythms that are much embraced, and his subject matter exacts a compelling pull. “A certain kind of paradox is built into jazz music,” remarked American culture critic Gerald Early. “You had people who created a music that’s really celebrating democratic possibilities: liberation, freedom of the spirit, a soaring above adversities – who really hadn’t experienced everything that democratic society, had to offer, but you could look around and see the promise embedded in the society. Jazz is a kind of lyricism about the great American promise and our inability to live up to it.”