BIO

Aaron Christopher Johnson fancies himself a part-time auteur. One foot in the real world, one in tomorrow. According to hero and guide David Bowie, “the future belongs to those who can hear it coming.” Famed music producer Joe Meek proclaimed, “I Hear A New World.” Aaron hears it too. A world where cinema, psychosis and pop music start a riot. A new groove. Don’t forget your headphones.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Working within the medium of digital video, I have focused my artistic practice on experimental film and music video. I utilize both genres to experiment with surreal imagery and narrative structure. The primary focus in my practice is the visual creation and subsequent dissection of mental states. Psychology is explored in filmic realities that stray from the day to day, mirroring our own but reveling in the unnatural and exaggerated. Outlandish and nightmarish characters enter the theater of the absurd where camp and horror aesthetics run wild in hyper statured technicolor tableaus. 

A distinct vocabulary is formed through conversations with soundtrack. Music is a crucial narrative voice. Images can come before and after the fact, both product and byproduct. The physical edit of a film and its representations of a locale, person, visage and mise en scene are subject to both structure and chance. There is a compromise between the inception of the idea and of the finished video. “Experimental” is a label I openly embrace. A project’s end result is a puzzle that has been completed without seeing a defined image, simply a sketch.

A film’s unique and unspoken language, a dialogue between abstraction, quotation and appropriated tropes becomes most apparent in the art direction. Bright expressionistic colors coupled with a rough and intentionally distressed aesthetic become the graphic guide to an altered state. A film’s setting is at once character and canvas. What takes place within its borders a painting, which when translated to screen becomes a kinetic reflection of life.

Utilizing the voice of the unreliable narrator mirrors the personal in the radically shifting perspectives of mental illness. The work strives to reconcile traditional narrative language(s) with the experimental. In doing so my work addresses reality itself. Drawn from life like scribblings in a manic journal entry, mood becomes subject to the mutating emotional condition of the visual and thematic content, the exaggerated and grotesque fodder of the human condition. An expressionist portrait of a fractured psyche.

“I’m here if I’m not all there”

EDUCATION

MFA in Visual Studies 2016 - Pacific Northwest College Of Art

BFA in Digital Film & Video 2011 - The Art Institute Of Portland

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

EXT. A TROUBLE IN NARRATIVE. A MUSICAL. - 2022

-Feature film. In production.

"Imaginary Music Videos” - 2020

-Short film. Official selection Covellite International Film Festival 2020.

“Spellbound" - 2018

- Short film. Official selection Covellite International Film Festival 2018.

“If You Want Twee (You Got It)”- 2017

- Official music video, Keith Top of the Pops and his Minor UK Indie Celebrity All Star Backing Band - “If You Want Twee (You Got It)”.

“In Other Worlds” (segment)- 2017

- Official contest selection, Barry Adamson “In Other Worlds” music video.