FACET is an audio/visual live improvisation, inundating audiences with projections from America’s attention-grabbing news culture nested in a dense soundscape of disparate musical genres mixed on three turntables. Images cascade, repeated and mirrored across multiple surfaces with oscillating masks concealing and revealing mass news segments from across decades. Within the intensity of the visual experience, the deejay grounds the audience with an improvised wash of atonal, arhythmic mixing of genres from across time phasing in and out of synch with each other. The experience challenges audiences to focus their attention in a constructed world demanding it from all directions.
daniel johnson is a multidisciplinary artist/performer drawing considerations and methodologies from his background as a parent, organizer, museum educator, and public historian. johnson’s work emerges in relationship with others and, at its root, centers the relationship itself as a practice of sincerity, reciprocity, and curiosity. Artistic products of his relationships with audiences and participants are reflections of an ongoing commitment to each other and to a shared path of inquiry.
The scaffolding for trusting relationships is ongoing work toward clarity in roles and agency, equitable access to information and decision-making, and direct discussion in the formation of agreements – and most importantly, being prepared to hold space for joy and vulnerability.
Through cultivating friendships and working relationships across a community, johnson discovers alignment and intersections among stories, shared intentions, and perceived challenges which at times go on to seed collaborative, multidisciplinary performances reflecting shared understandings, outstanding questions, and further curiosities of the group. johnson firmly believes that cultural expression provides the most powerful tools for forming affinity and focusing collective deliberation toward practical impacts for everyday life.
johnson is the Principal Artist for Significant Developments and the Special Projects Manager for Wolfe Studio. His work has been featured by PolicyLink, the Center for the Future of Museums, Georgetown University’s Gnovis journal, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Innovation Review, Mississippi Free Press, and Mississippi Today.
