Artist Statement:
Shallom Johnson is a photographer, visual artist, contemporary dance artist and freelance writer based in Vancouver BC. She holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Dance and English from Simon Fraser University. In all of her artistic endeavors, Shallom is interested in exploring interdisciplinary collaboration, new media and technologies and new methods of creation and community engagement. This is her first time showing photographic work in a commercial gallery, and she is very excited to be able to share her work with others in such a beautiful space.
Artistic Statement/Description of work:
Conceptually, Shallom is interested in capturing transience - providing a concrete record of street art and graffiti, art forms that are in essence ephemeral and fleeting. This body of work explores themes of urban change and evolution on an individual and community level - the fight for visual space in an environment that has become increasingly saturated with imagery, with public artistic statements strictly limited to government or corporate-sanctioned imagery. Shallom hopes to encourage people to take a closer look around them as they go about their daily routines - to see not only the artwork that adorns our city streets, but at the streets themselves, and all of the possibilities that lie therein.
Aesthetically, Shallom attempts to see past standardized notions of beauty and capture the extraordinary in the everyday - finding unexpected light in the disregarded, darker places. She is interested in reconnecting to the realities of existing in an urban space - in noticing the details, seeking out the overlooked, presenting ordinary objects in a new and intriguing perspective. She tends to work with a close frame, and sometimes only captures an excerpted version of the full artwork/object. Shallom spends a lot of time wandering the city’s forgotten spaces, alleyways and empty lots, in search of hidden treasures that may not be there tomorrow
