This is a fairly close-up detail of an acrylic paint pen drawing, Signature Field 1, from 2013. In that year I made a small series of Signature Field drawings/paintings in which I repeatedly scrawled my signature all over large sheets of black paper like this. Signature Field 1 was shown in the inaugural Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition in Wellington in 2013. I’ve been interested in using signatures, those often lauded marks of artistic authenticity and branding, for a long time. No doubt I’ll return to “the artist’s signature" again at some stage. This series of work really continues a thread I pursued for a few years and quite a few exhibitions in Australia in the mid to late 1990s. The work involved using my signature in various ways, including on generic products for sale as part of art installations (along with videos aping infomercials), as giant computer cut vinyl lettering, and eventually across giant inkjet-print-on-canvas banknotes and novelty bank cheques. Growing up in New Zealand, I was well aware of Billy Apple’s (#billyapple, @billyapplecider, @maryandbillyapple) early and ongoing work with signature and artist-as-brand. In the 1990s the international art market was expanding rapidly, so this kind of work seemed all the more relevant to me. That work was in many ways a response to his. In hindsight, perhaps New Zealand may have been a more appropriate place to try and present that work, but I was living in Sydney at the time, working part-time at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and completing a Master’s at Sydney College of the Arts, so it made sense to show it in Australia. Still, it seemed quite out of step to what was being made in Oz at the time, which I didn't mind. #painting #drawing #contemporaryart #signature #brand #nzart
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