The Long Goodbye

​Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present The Long Goodbye, Kysa Johnson’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Johnson’s new body of work uses notated subatomic decay patterns to represent the birth, life, and death, or “long goodbye,” of celestial entities. The processes of the universe have long sparked Johnson’s interest; and in this series she draws inspiration from the formation of stars in nebulae and their eventual demise in supernova. These stellar nurseries are filled with particles where a disturbance in the balance between gravity and pressure can trigger a collapse and eventual transformation into a star. One day this star will become too heavy to hold itself and explode, starting the cycle again.

Johnson uses the “beautiful looping pathways” of particle decay to paint celestial happenings, from the Orion Nebula cluster, to young and proto stars, to dying stars in the Milky Way, finding a correlation between the cycle of birth, transformation, and collapse at the very smallest and largest boundaries of our physical reality. These images are built up from hundreds of ink marks that are fluidly rendered and organic in shape on a rich black background. Johnson is inspired by images gathered by the Hubble telescope and particle accelerators. Her work focuses on concepts that exist at the very edges of our cognitive capabilities, and yet through her practice she is able to make the unfathomable both relatable and tangible.