Eat the Sun, paintings by Kysa Johnson at Morgan Lehman Art Gallery in Manhattan

 

Subatomic particle decay patterns are so provocative as a symbolic language in the work of Kysa Johnson because nobody can understand or explain why this decay happens. Scientists can only say that certain particles are “likely” to change into other particles. Certain types of elements will lose protons and neutrons and become something else or some particles, like the tau particle, will just change into one of three other particles.

So “decay” is not really what is going on here. By using the term decay scientists show the limitations of language when it comes to even physical phenomena. In fact, what often happens in subatomic particle decay is that a greater level of permanence occurs. So the term decay is being used as a marker or signifier because there is no precise term for this process. If a person wanted to be a smart-aleck, he/she could say: subatomic decay is not really decay but the use of decay as a flawed metaphor for a process we really do not understand, but which we can trace.

Thus scientists use the expression “likely” in regard to particle decay. It is “likely” that some particles will change into other particles. For Johnson the patterns created through this type of decay become a symbolic language. Subatomic decay is something that happens spontaneously. We, however, like having a cause that produces an effect. We do not quite get spontaneous change. Our entire system of science is predicated on predictable relationships. This is not predictable, it is likely, for whatever reason. So the patterns we can observe become components of a type of curlicue script or diagram for Johnson. We can scrutinize the pathways of these elegant and swirling patterns, understand the script, while hoping for clues to the origin of the unpredictable change creating the elegant scrawl. Johnson uses a language that always asks questions.

But the patterns do not point back to the origin of the change just as the shape, content and movement of objects in the universe tell us nothing about its ultimate origin. So the patterns in Johnson’s work also become markers for the unknowable, while illustrating a path to permanence and stability. It is a language always pointing back to the fact that science does not explain everything we would like it to explain. At a subatomic level, science breaks down completely and resorts to probability. When the scientist Emil Dubois-Reymond was asked how something could come from nothing or how something could have always been, his answer was “Ignoramus et ignorabimus”. We do not know and we shall never know.

So Johnson begins with a symbolic language born of the inexplicable but promising permanence. A language that points at the limits of language itself and what we wish we could grasp beyond language but never will. This hearkens back to when mystics like Giordano Bruno sought to understand the inexplicable in nature but were pushed aside by folks like Galileo who realized that mathematics and description itself could yield enough to create a useable science. But there is still something we may not grasp about nature and may never grasp and these patterns point to this. Indeed, if we ever do learn what came before the Big Bang, it will come from a monk in a cave before in comes from someone with a telescope.  

Johnson’s colorful, fluent and spindly imagery derives from the patterns, like an emergent quality, and suggests the hope for nascent or burgeoning qualities within our minds due to our proclivity to creative mysticism. These patterns are highly suggestive of other things. In the past, for example, Johnson used these decay patterns to depict galaxies. Here she creates a number of floral designs. It is as if the patterns, like branches in the spring, have allowed for the emergence of this effusive flora. She uses the patterns of the incomprehensible but permanent as a base for the ephemeral. Yet, the ephemerality of flowers ultimately takes on the mantle of permanence through artistic expression.  

Johnson calls this show: Eat the Sun, referencing the process of photosynthesis. The existence of the sun allowed for a process to be developed on Earth whereby the energy of a star could be used creatively by organisms to manufacture sugars as basic nutrients for life. Decay patterns suggested, for Johnson, stems, leaves and flowers, the structures of the organisms which evolved to derive benefit from the sun.

The patterns are a language showing a permanence which becomes the basis for images of what we consider the ultimate in ephemera, but ephemera which have created a cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, rejuvenation and evolution. They represent a transitory existence of extreme brilliance and beauty due to the departure from the stable, permanent and predictable.