About
Pickerrs.com is website designed to share the Music, Portrait, Freelance Work and Kerrville Folk Festival photography created by David Johnson. Please visit www.davidjohnsonstudio.com to see more of his visual art.
David Johnson is an artist based in St. Louis, MO. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 and earned his BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography from Texas Christian University. In 2011, David was awarded the Great Rivers Visual Arts Award from the Gateway Foundation. This biennial award culminated with his 2012 exhibition institutional etiquette and strange overtones at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including: the Contemporary Art Museum, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Los Caminos, and Boots Contemporary Art Space, all in St. Louis; Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen, Demark; La Esquina, Kansas City, MO; Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR; Maps Contemporary Art Space, Belleville, IL; and Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX. His work can be found in the collection at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Currently, Johnson is a Lecturer at Washington University in Saint Louis and Saint Louis University.
Photos By Jess T. Dugan
In Can Be This Way Always Project Statement
Since 2007, I have been photographically documenting the Kerrville Folk Festival in central Texas, an annual 18-day event that has been in existence since 1972. This body of work captures the festivalgoers, the surrounding Texas Hill Country and Quiet Valley Ranch (host site of the festival), and it’s transitory yet longstanding community. This documentary project observes the American traveling troubadour and the unique camaraderie and society that develop when such individuals come together. Many of the large format images of individuals and their spaces depict a subversion of the conformity and complications of our modern-day existence and the simultaneous entering into another world that possesses its own unspoken codes of conduct and hierarchy.
Most of my creative work considers how the urban environment and its physical architecture influence a community’s organization. My work demonstrates ways in which a space can affect personality and how individuals impact a space. This ongoing folk festival series It Can Be This Way, Always continues my conceptual interests within a very different environment. This environment lacks physical infrastructure and permanence, allowing an examination of the individual and communal identity in a perpetually fluctuating space.
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