Through its characteristic explosive imagery, Chris Johanson’s work embodies powerful contradiction — vibrant sexuality and personal awkwardness, apocalyptic scenarios and peaceful ideals. It is simultaneously crude and hyper-urban, childlike and highly cerebral.

Chris started out in the early 1990s, painting skateboards and tagging bathroom walls and lampposts in the Mission district of San Francisco. Today, he hasn’t strayed far from those street beginnings — his paintings and installations have brought an eco-friendly, squatter sensibility to the mainstream art world.

Towards the end of the ‘90s, Chris began to show at San Francisco’s Jack Hanley Gallery. His outsider sensibility was reflected in his practice of utilizing castoff materials — wood and metals recycled from the streets around the Mission. In 2004, Johanson moved to Portland, where his art has become more ambitious and monumental. But his liberal politics and pacifist ideals continue to inform his work.

For his show last year at New York’s Deitch Projects, Chris constructed an elaborate three-dimensional installation suggestive of a future puzzle world — one that’s full of color and gesture, and made entirely of recycled materials.

We asked Johanson’s longtime friend, artist Lara Allen, to speak to him on the phone recently from the index NYC headquarters.

Lara: I feel a connection between painting and politics in your work — it seems like you filter ideas through painting, by putting them into this material form.
Chris: I work in a lot of mediums — I have a record label, and I make music. Sometimes I’ll do a performance or I’ll write something or put on an event — but to me it’s all the same thing. I infuse whatever I’m doing with myself, so everything has my politics in it. A lot of times the politics are right on the surface for everyone to see, and sometimes they’re more hidden. But the real meaning is in the tension, or it’s in the paint — the meditative quality of the paint, the serenity or the anger.

Lara: In your early work, I was always amazed by your restraint, and your willingness to embrace simplicity.
Chris: Really? I’m surprised that you had that reaction, because looking back at that work I did like fifteen or twenty years ago… I feel like it was pretty much infused with anxiety and anger. I still deal with anxiety, but now I’m trying to make more peaceful art. Back then, I thought of my work as documentary picture making, and I still do, but I consider what I want to make as peace paintings. I want to make things that have a sense of serenity. And when I do a whole show, I want it to me more serene than negative.


Lara: Is that because perhaps your motivation has changed as you’ve gotten older and settled into marriage?
Chris: Well, I have a different life now than I had when I was younger. Now I’m with Jo and I want to give her a lot of my energy. But I guess my motivation is still the same; it’s like I’m doing magic or something. I feel like I just have to do it. I feel like it makes peace in my brain to do these repetitive paintings where I’m just thinking about the state of the world, and life and death, and all the factors of existence. I know it’s a control freak thing to do, but it helps me to feel peaceful. This is what I always did, even as a little kid.

Lara: Your show at Deitch Projects, titled “Totalities,” was described as a contemporary living situation. I loved that there were no references to digital technology.
Chris: I think there’s one person who’s in a control center, and he’s maybe or maybe not going to push a button. That’s a reference to the war in Iraq.

Lara: How would you describe your worldview at the moment?
Chris: I’m hopeful. I’m not jaded on things.

Lara: Have you ever thought about having yo
ur own gallery space?
Chris: I love looking at art, especially a couple of years after it’s made. I love that everything can have an art historical context almost immediately. I think if I had an art space, one idea would be to not show anything that’s happening right now, only to show stuff that had happened a few years before.

Lara: That seems like you’re looking at art as a living thing…watching it cure.
Chris: Watching it cure. That’s a great way of putting it. I like that a lot.

Lara: Speaking of evolution, I feel like your work took off when you started doing three-dimensional stuff. There was this sudden convergence of wood and color, feeling and tactility.
Chris: That came from skating around the Mission in San Francisco, where there was a lot of garbage — free stuff everywhere. All that garbage really influenced me. It gave me the capacity to make things that were more psychologically vibrant. I started exploring different ways to get peoples’ attention.

Lara: I wonder if your nonconformity is a product of your learning disability. Maybe that’s just how you have always related.
Chris: Yeah, when I was younger, I hated school so much. I would be in school, and things would just start to not make sense. Things just got cloudier and cloudier, and I just couldn’t think. The idea of writing an essay back then — I just couldn’t do it. I failed classes over and over again. I think I could do it now, cause I just wouldn’t give a shit.

Lara: Do you still feel like you have difficulties communicating — or just dealing with the everyday?
Chris: I don’t know. The brain is a weird thing. Most people figure out a way that they can make it happen. They figure out a good way of communicating, they know how to put their checks in the bank, they show up for work… they figure out how to be good at something to get by.