Known Silence: A Conversation with Leasho Johnson
We have stepped over the threshold of what is called a new year, the start of the next cycle of calendar days. While I appreciate the year-end roundups and lists, I don’t often know what to say about the end of a year (especially the Gregorian one). In Palestine, in Sudan, in the Congo, in all places touched by the incursions of U.S. empire, the carnage continues, and the resistance goes on. The date has changed, but I’m not sure what that means. It feels easier sometimes to think of time in waves, in annual patterns of warming and cooling, in the flowering and fruiting cycles of perennial plants. In displaced generations and wars, in the children who make it to adulthood despite being marked for death, and the children who don’t.
That’s all to say I apologize, I guess, for the lack of a new year post. But perhaps you resonate more with different timescales too. Below I’m sharing an interview I did with Jamaican artist Leasho Johnson, about color and myths and plastic forks, and some other things too. In 2024, I promise to keep listening.
Leasho Johnson is a Jamaican-born artist who draws on plant pigments, fables, and mythologies both personal and collective to tell stories of queer Caribbean life. In Johnson’s work, Anansi, Redman, dancehall riddims, and the ecological landscapes of Jamaica all come out to play, inviting us into a textured and dreamlike world in which bodies are drawn to each other as if by design, as if by an imperative of embrace.
How did you choose your mediums? Paper mounted on canvas is such a distinctive look. I was struck by how you can see the texture of the paper being weathered by, and in some places buckling under, the weight of the paint, in a way that you wouldn’t with only canvas.
I work in small spaces and I know that everywhere I'm going to be is temporary. In terms of it being mounted on canvas—I was reconfiguring a lot of things, [asking] what are the conditions I need my work to meet?
At school I wanted to find materials that spoke to the place that I'm coming from. Halfway through SAIC I was presented with a question from Arnold Kemp about my relationship to color. At that point I stopped working in color and spent the time reading. I was given this book What Color is the Sacred? by Michael Taussig. He asks questions about the extractive effects of the Western world on the [Global] South, thinking about how colors, substances, materials are taken from certain places like India and the Caribbean. I was also doing a materials class, I was learning to make my own paint and then discovered distemper. I realized I couldn’t use it on canvas because it’s a thin film, it’s flaky and it needs paper.
After school my professor wanted to purchase one of the pieces, and they were like, “you should just mount it on canvas.” It was a small one and I was like, “I didn't know you could do that” (laughs). I literally didn’t have any knowledge, I did some research after I started scaling them up.
Going back to the question of color, I wanted to hear more about the process of natural dyeing. You mentioned the extractive relationship the Western world has to pigments and color. Why did you choose to use pigments and plant dyes that are found in the Caribbean? How does that reflect your own relationship to color?
As I said, reading Michael Taussig, I’m thinking about how color defines space. Because I was venturing into the interiority of being Black and being from the Caribbean, I needed to find other languages and other ways of interpreting the fact that I’ve chosen to work in paint—you know, how is that connected to my body? Being in Chicago, I’m as far away from the Caribbean as I possibly can, and the book let me venture back into thinking of the fact that logwood is something I had a personal relationship with here [in Jamaica]. My father rears goats, and it’s a wood that we take and actually use it to make ply posts. My grandmother was telling me stories about using the heart of it to polish the floor of her house.
Of course a lot of these crops [in the book] are harvested in the same way in which they harvest sugarcane. With indigo in India, they would have men using their feet to stomp and mash the plants. And it would eventually seep into their skin and semen, it affects the entire body. And of course, the whole aspect of chromophobia, and thinking about modernism, how if you want a room a particular color, you never really question where it’s sourced from. I think that set myself up in terms of thinking about my own body and my everyday, being from a place that is a hundred percent affected by color.
Can you tell me about some of the colors you grew up with, or that you see around you in Jamaica now?
That’s a great question. As you say that, my mind goes to the dirt. Where I live, it's actually a limestone mountain. There are lots of hills, most of the mountains here in Jamaica are limestone, but not all of them. Some of them are covered with the red oxide soil that can be used for bauxite. So that’s also an issue, where we face extraction from industry. But there are parts of Negril that have, literally we call it “red ground” because the ground is so red, and when the rain falls it splashes up on the walls and it’s on your shoes. We’re surrounded by greenery all the time. What gives me a lot of nostalgia, because I’m on the Western side of the island, the sunsets here are just very distinctive. Tinges of peach and oranges and reds sometimes contrast with purples and blues. I remember vividly as a child, sometimes there’s an evening where the rain and the sun would be shining at the same time and you everything is kind of tinted gold, that’s also just a magical moment.
The devil and his wife are fighting.*
[Laughs] Exactly.
A lot of the bodies in your work are very fluid, and almost porous. There’s a way the boundaries between bodies almost disappear or tend to blur. I was wondering what led you to this way of portraying bodies, this kind of figurative painting, and whether there’s a relationship between that style and the erotics you’re portraying.
The Western mind [doesn’t] have an issue thinking about the [Global] South as a very sexual place. The fact that there’s so much sun and there’s so much skin…for me it’s also [about] the philosophy that the Black body is very much related to the earth in a way. So I wanted the perfect metaphor for that. And in a more personal way, I was thinking about how much things happen invisibly, either just behind a shrub or behind a rock, some magical moments of queerness that tend to evade the known.
[There’s] also a kind of built mythology around queerness, that we can do these things because we absorb more water in our bodies, for example [laughs]. Just some weird mythologies that people build up because they don’t know, or they refuse to want to know. But for me, that has a relationship to nature, and things that are being discovered every day, a species of plants, or a species of lizard, just the idea that there is so much left unknown. For me, I wanted to kind of reconnect myself back to nature because when I’m in the states I feel that separation very actively. You don’t know where foods come from, you don’t know where anything comes from, but anything is at your fingertips. And I think that device is to kind of remind me where I’m from, and it grounds me.
A lot of curatorial text about your work focuses on the alienation and violence experienced by queer people in Jamaica. At the same time, so many of the figures in your work are embracing, they’re in these moments of tenderness, these moments of love and care. I wonder if you could talk to this duality. How do you see your figures dreaming beyond that kind of normative violence that often defines the Caribbean in the Western gaze?
Well, you know, I did that for myself, I needed to find solace in the work I’m doing [laughs]. Because prior to leaving Jamaica, the work had always been about its immediate surroundings, so anytime acts of violence come up, or I would see something like daggering in the dancehall, I would want to make a commentary on it in the work. But because I’m so far from that source, I realized I didn't have the audience to riff or have that exchange with. Because [in the U.S.] there’s always like, having to explain what dancehall is, or what it’s like to be queer in a space like [Jamaica]. So because I was moving to a different stage of my life, I needed to come to peace with myself. I needed to be okay with whatever I had and hadn’t experienced for myself. I needed to find some peace, and at the same time I needed to devoid myself of having to explain certain things. So the work became a kind of masking and unmasking at the same time.
One of the contradictions that I find coming from this country is how much violence and love is tied up in the same thing. And I think it’s also because we’re trying to unpack a lot of the effects of slavery that are tied up in our own bodies. Of course that comes off sometimes angrily, aggressively, violently. But still kind of like this yearning for tenderness.
You mentioned masking and unmasking, and the difficulty with those acts of translation in a U.S. context. Who do you see as your audience? Do you feel like you work with codes in any way, or include certain things only specific audiences will understand?
[In terms of audience] I’m definitely thinking about the queer folks here in Jamaica. I realize they will be an anomaly for a long time. I’ve been researching and thinking about, how can I represent something that we don’t want to exist? Sometimes for me it’s just as simple as the interaction between two queer people, those dances we go to that nobody knows about, having to go to a movie in public, or a couple dating and having to announce who they are and what they represent to each other. So there’s this kind of known silence that threads through, the idea of being able to be transformable.
Maybe that’s something in the paintings that can only be accessed by people who have experienced it. The same way other queer folks will reach out online and say they love what I’m doing—you know, it’s weird because I thought I was only doing this for myself, and then it’s inspired them and I love that. It always shocks me because I feel like it took me so long to come to the point where I’m both confident and knowledgeable. Because we’re working with materials that don’t really exist, do you know what I mean? So it’s both locked up in an experience and locked up in a doing. And that’s what I like with the practice now.
Yeah, that's definitely the way I felt about your work when I first saw it. I was like, I need to talk to this person! [laughs]. As a queer person with Jamaican heritage, looking at your work made me think so much about those known silences, about fluidity, and about the way these erotics and these relationships kind of move through the culture in ways that are acknowledged but not always spoken.
Yeah, exactly! It's really incredible how that's done, really. It still catches me off guard.
There’s something about your use of material and how layered it felt. When I stood in front of your pieces looking at those dark blues, it felt like I was just falling through the color. I’m thinking about the layers of color and meaning in your work, that interplay between the visible, most obvious color and the accumulation of material that lies just under the surface.
That's what I love about working with distemper. There's a consistent palette that I use, but a lot of it has no white base in it unless I've added it. So a lot of the paints—like that blue you're seeing is very, very transparent so anything that's behind it comes through. And that’s a particular type of quality that I love.
I wanted to ask you about language. So many of your titles incorporate Patois proverbs, Anansi folklore, a very place-specific sense of lyricism. What is the place of folklore and dialect and fables in your work?
It’s funny that you ask me that question, because right now I'm trying to do research on the Bog Walk Gorge, the bridge. There's such a present mythology about why cars crash into it, and it's something you can track right back to slavery. I don't know if you've ever heard of the golden table?
No, I haven't.
There's a story about a pirate who decided to take all this gold and make a golden table out of it in order to keep it in one place. Apparently, he was transporting it across the [Bog Walk Gorge] bridge and the water came up all of a sudden and took it from him. They say the gold was so brilliant that you couldn’t really distinguish it from the sun’s reflection. For me there is a direct relationship between mythological “acts of nature,” creatures like mermaids, and the relationship to queer bodies as a conduit [for the divine]. In a lot of instances, if you think about the orishas or any form of voodoo, there are lots of queer people who occupy those spaces, who become these avatars. The idea of somebody being visibly queer draws a kind of mythological power that people become fearful of. I want to talk about spaces of transcendence, and deities are one of those [spaces]. Anansi is also a prime example of that. That’s part of my ongoing series where Anansi is literally a representation of two males [having sex], and together they become like a creature.
I’m excited to see where this work about the Bog Walk Bridge goes.
Yeah, I'm hoping for them to become a series of works. Since I'm [in Jamaica] for this holiday it's one of my assignments to see what other records they might have in the library. Even recently, there was talk about appeasing the mermaids of the Bog Walk Gorge with a sacrifice, which I thought was the most Black thing you could ever think of. It’s interesting that when it becomes a space of unexplainability, It’s this tension point between nature and technology, the fact that a lot of these accidents are cars, like the last one was a minibus filled with people that just like ran off into the bridge. The bridge itself was made by slaves, and it's just unmodifiable, like it can't turn into a two-lane road or you can't put railings on it, they’ve done it before and it’s failed. I think that says something about the presence of Black bodies, the bodies that made the bridge itself, and also the voice of the land. It's almost like an embodiment of the curse itself upon the land.
All the time you hear announcements [about accidents], like “oh, the car just lost control, it just turned,” and it's really bizarre. Anytime I'm driving over it, I have to hold my breath. It's really scary, and it's so funny that with all the power of modern technology we still turn to offerings and that sense of ancestral veneration.
I also wanted to ask you about your artistic influences. Are there artists or media that inspire you, that have shaped your work in a significant way?
When I started my early work around cartooning I was thinking about about Boris Hoppek. As it became more about painting, I was thinking about Francis Bacon. I like how he deals with interiority, but his interiority is very much about a kind of white body, and how that’s committed to the cube or grids. My version [of interiority] has a lot to do with nature, the larger space. I’m always thinking about photographs in terms of color and memory. I think about early film photographs, the effects of the colors being burnt in a particular way. When I’m trying to find a particular yellow or sepia, I literally try to mix [film photo colors] in paint sometimes.
I think a lot about Theaster Gates’s practice. Obviously he’s working with different elements, but what I found very interesting—I didn’t really understand conceptualism outside of a white lens until he started doing it. For me, it was like, oh I can talk about a Black experience just by the materials that are associated with it in a particular way. And I like the fact that he’s—I don’t know if you consider this to be Black postmodernism—but it’s a way in which he’s taken spirituality and turned it into a kind of modernism. Discovering his practice was like a eureka moment for me. Because I was like, all right, I can think about certain things in my immediate environment, but instead of working with a gutted building, I can talk about a very personal story, and it has a similar effect—thinking about a street dance, or a gay dance in the bush somewhere.
Cartooning has a very heavy influence on my work, like the cartoons in the 1940s where everyone would be dancing and there’s a melody to it [laughs]. It’s this tongue in cheek surrealism, about serious life matters. It’s a kind of madness and a chaos that’s inspired me in a particular way.
So your painting Keen to do harm and take revenge lightly is done in your usual style of distemper and natural dye on paper, but there’s also a plastic fork stuck onto the canvas [laughs]. It felt very unexpected. Can you tell me more about that?
I saw a photo of the rapper Redman with a plastic fork in his mouth, it looked like he’d jus a meal. There’s a kind of Black spiritual experience of eating street food with those plastic forks, it could be [during] a dead yard, a nine night. I was thinking about the character in the painting, thinking, what if it was interacting with something in real life? I also just liked the attitude. For me, those portraits talk about a particular attitude and period of time. I wanted the character to be kind of like a thug, kind of standoffish. I wanted him to be like, “wa ‘gawaan dog?” [laughs]
Just sticking [the fork] there disrupts the paint. You’re thinking, why is that there? It’s a beautiful painting, why did you put the fork in it? For me, that kind of reflects the experience of Black artists doing Black art. The first question is [always], why are they there?
Do you have a sense of what direction your next works will take? Are there new themes or mediums you’ve been exploring?
I'm definitely trying to work on sculptures. I’ve gone back to clay and I’m making these heads, you could probably call them abstract portraits. For me it’s just the idea of being connected to the Earth. I’m working with earthenware that’s fired a particular way to become a black material, and I’m trying to activate it with objects like a hammock and a netball hoop, things that I’ve experienced here in Jamaica. It’s a very slow process of expanding into sculpture, it’s been like three years now [laughs]. But that’s where I’m at right now, trying to pull together sculptures to accompany paintings.
I think those were all the questions I had for you. Is there anything you want to add?
Yes, I realize I have to clear this up: the black charcoal [I use] interlinks with the paints so well that people don’t question what material it is. They’re just seeing black substance. But this is charcoal and I’d like to say that more. This isn’t just a black material, this is a tree that was burnt and then rubbed onto the surface of the paper. Throughout my practice, there’s drawing and painting smoothly mixing into each other. That’s something that I find eludes folks a lot, because they’re often thinking more about color than material. But that’s literally a material on my finger, a touch that goes into [the work].
*Jamaican proverb