Mick Johnson's '9' drops a hole-in-one

By Farrah Madanay     1/17/12 6:00pm

The golf course moves indoors with Mick Johnson's exhibition "9," on display at the Rice Media Center. "9," which opened last Thursday, represents a culmination of Johnson's two interests: golf and art. Johnson, who usually explores architectural spaces confined within homes, steps out of his domestic comfort zone and into the realm of fabricated nature.

"Sports being presented in an artistic way is usually not a good thing," Johnson, who admitted to having toyed around with the curatorial process of "9" only a few days before the exhibition's opening reception, said.

"9" spans both the top and bottom floors of the Rice Media Center. Though clearly the golf course marks the overall theme, individual elements of the exhibition appear disengaged, yet not quite discordant, in relation to each other. Johnson mimics the signage demarcating golf course holes by displaying, in no particular order, nine numbered wooden plaques around the exhibition. The fluidity of the art world converges with the precision of the golf world on these signs, as the stenciled numbers are painted in haphazard globs of paint.

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Six banners of checkered flags stretch across opposing walls in the main architectural module on the top floor. Behind these flags are two figural tree-shaped pieces made of wire and cloth. The back wall-art evokes imagery of either golf ball silhouettes or a chain-linked fence. As I examined the intricacies of the different aesthetics, Johnson himself stood beside me, staring at his work just as intensely. "When I come back for the opening I can look at my work as a viewer rather than as a maker," Johnson said.

Johnson showcases two main sculptural installations on the bottom floor of the exhibition. Against a large window on one wall of the room is a streaming ribbon sculpture made of yellow, orange, white and pink glossy ribbons. The ribbons, held up by pins, fall from the ceiling; the ribbon tails meet on the floor in a nest of tangled undulations.

"I've seen [the ribbon] installation outside of this [7 p.m.] hour and it's really pretty reflecting the light from the sunset and its delicate features," Dolly Li, a Baker senior and Economics and Visual and Dramatic Arts double major, said.

The second sculptural piece on the bottom floor consists of a long, rippling white ribbon which cuts across the floor at an obtuse angle. Sitting atop the ribbon on one end of the room is an amorphous mass of cement divot-shaped blocks with green-tipped white pegs of wood protruding through the tops of them. Though this floor installation is distinct in form and function from its streaming ribbon counterpart, Johnson places the two in dialogue through the common element of the undulating glossy ribbon.

The most representational form of art included in "9" is an expansive wall mural of a golf game scorecard. The straight lines and ordered columns of the mural exist in blatant contrast to the opposing wall of free-falling ribbon.

Perhaps the most unconventional aspect of Johnson's exhibition is not what is included, but rather what is not.

"[The exhibition] is a fractured installation. Giving the works titles might fracture them even more," Johnson said of his decision to exclude the normative titles.

Despite its disorienting and seemingly arbitrary composition, Johnson's "9" succeeds in showcasing the aesthetics of texture and abstraction. With simple colors and materials, Johnson artfully demonstrates how a space, in this case, a golf course, is constructed, and how particular elements define a mode of architecture.

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