Brooklynn Johnson: Messages From Fish

As light passes through water, a substance more dense than air, it bends and slows. For humans, this process of refraction distorts how we see objects in water, as our eyes are tuned for the refractive index of air. In order to explore and experience this environment, humans must adapt and use specialized tools. With our breath held or with our breathing devices and our eye masks, recognizable objects still appear larger, sometimes misshapen, and colors inevitably begin to dull as waves of light stretch deeper. Like a low cresting wave on the ocean, red is the first color to fade with its long wavelength and low frequency. It starts to disappear at 15 feet deep. Next to go is orange, then yellow, green, and blue. Violet is the last color to be completely absorbed by depth.

Color sinking away from human view feels similar to experiencing a significant loss. Describing this, Johnson says,

“Our vision changes when air meets water and water gets deeper, and so does our perception of people we’ve lost. Memories change and fade the farther they get from their source, and recognizing what remains in the wake of what was close and familiar feels a lot like adapting to refractions. The willingness to recognize them feels like an act of decoding messages from beneath, from someone fluent in a mysterious environment that can only be known by the living to a small degree.”

For Johnson, the paintings in this exhibition are “visual reflections of this act of message-reading, with each image containing refractions of its own: billowing rainbows, pearls that stretch, and petals and sunsets that split and repeat. Red is present but only in mixtures, never quite as itself. Some compositions are frantic, obscuring and uncovering themselves, and some are calm—like waves in the ocean, waves of grief, like waves of light passing through water.”