Tuesday, September 25, 2007 - The National Post - 2 page centre spread of Avenue section Avenue - Arts, Culture & Puppetry BEN KAPLAN
	Danger isn't so much afoot as a sock Sometimes, inspiration strikes like a bolt of lightning. Other times, like a Volkswagen Jetta in front of a Beer Store on the east side of Toronto. "Lying there after my accident, on great amounts of paint killers, not being able to move and feeling quite sorry for myself, I began to fixate on the idea of sock puppets," says Kirsten Johnson, 40, of the origins of her latest exhibition. "I always thought the art world takes itself awfully seriously. Lying in bed, sketching my laundry, I started thinking, "This could be great!'" The filmmaker, painter and writer makes the actual puppets from her white and grey tube socks and then paints the over-the-top puppet shows of her friends. "I tend to work with actors, so you can describe the most abstract words that make absolutely no sense and they'll get it - it's amazing," says Johnson of such sock-puppet paintings as Socially ill at ease, Fiscally responsible and Codependent from her 2003 Touchy-Feely show. Now, after a four-year hiatus, Johnson has brought back her puppets to bid adieu to U.S. President George W. Bush. The Homeland Security Color-Coded Advisory System with Sockpuppets is currently on display at the XeXe Gallery in downtown Toronto. "It's already been hugely misinterpreted," Johnson confides. "I got a really angry response from someone saying, 'God bless George Bush, he's the reason you're not wearing a burka!' I was like, 'Wow, they're sock puppets, relax.'" The Homeland Security Color-Coded Advisory System with Sockpuppets continue at XeXe Gallery (624 Richmond St. West, Toronto) until Oct. 13 and will be on view all night this Saturday as part of Nuit Blanche.

August 28 - Sept 1, 2006 - The National Post Summer Diaries Canvas & Casting Calls Every August, we excerpt the daily diaries of creative types acdross Canada. This week's correspondent is a Toronto painter and actor. BY KIRSTEN JOHNSON Managed to install lighting fixture today without electrocuting myself. Good girl. Geoff and I are having our one-year anniversary of moving into our house/his birthday/my birthday party on Saturday so of course we are trying to do six months of work in five days. Then it's time to go to the audition - why are they always clear across town during rush hour? Odd, it's for a FedEx commercial, one in which people are trying to send a package to Germany, and just yesterday I was trying to send a large package to Germany - and yes, I called FedEx. For some reason I've been selling a lot of paintings to Germany recently. God bless the internet. There's nothing like getting surprise fan mail from far away, or better yet, a sale to lift your spirits after a trying day. The audition was relatively low on the annoying scale. Good. Often these commercial auditions are downright festivals of the insecure. Yes, I am an actor some of the time, but put enough of us together in a small room together and it's unpleasant to say the least. No one really is comfortable with the concept of being there, trying to sell this or that useless product in less than dignified situations. (In one of my last commercials, a mini-Pepsi can fell out of my ear while I was wearing a towel.)

No one feels they're where they rightly should be but we want the job nonetheless, to varying levels of desperation. We talk in too-loud voices and are aggressively friendly. Come to think of it, I've been enjoying them more recently - probably because my level of desperation is practically nil. Then to my studio. Speaking of anniversaries, I've just celebrated seven years in my studio in Liberty Village by nailing another poppy to my wall. Apparently, the space used to be a Remembrance Day poppy factory to go along with the munitions factory down the road. (Hmmm, what a crummy celebration - will do better on Saturday). I'm in the middle of several paintings right now. I'm finding it helps me be more objective, and gives me time to change my mind a hundred times about what needs to be more blue, less blue... Actually, that last line is a crack inspired by my meeting with the devil. The devil is a Quebec-cum-Californian art dealer of an uncertain age (neck looks 60, tautness of skin looks 20....hmmm) who tormented a small group of us poor-but-hopeful painters a few months back. "I could sell this easily for thousands of American dollars if only it was less blue," was the comment the painter beside me got. I was told that people won't buy pictures of people unless their faces were hidden, by, say, a very large hat. Sigh. It's funny how when someone arrives for a meeting in a private plane, it gives them clout that's hard to ignore no matter how well balanced you think you are. But what else is the devil's job if not to make you question your instincts? I listed to crackly AM radio playing '40's music while I added large pink bows onto the oven mitts worn by a punked-out teen offering up a pie. An odd touch but odder still - it wored. 1 a.m. - finished went home and added a quick coat of primer to the now fixed kitchen ceiling. Then bed.

Thursday, December 29, 2005 - Ottawa Citizen BEST OF 2005 - The year in pictures Peter Simpson, Arts & Entertainment Editor

.... June: Kirsten Johnson's vernissage at Artguise on a sweltering night. Her portraits of precocious children were a big hit.

June, 2005 - Ottawa Sun Sizzling Summer Arts Kirsten Johnson Pulls us into a hot summer of art with her take on kinship, Make Me Anita Euteneier

Pull, by Kirsten Johnson: Sisters working it out

Toronto artist Kirsten Johnson can best be described as a renaissance woman. Known among the city's culture vultures for her work as an actor in film - David Cronenbert's eXistenZ and Don McKellar's Last Night - and in theatre, Johnson is also a renowned portraitist known for her hyper-realistic oil paintings. Her debut Ottawa showing is an exhibition called Make Me, opening Friday at Artguise. The series of 20 oil on wood paintings features pairs of sisters and touches on the complexity of their relations. Johnson represents the rivalry by showing the sisters engaged in a tug of war. Joining these paintings are several smaller pieces of small (sister-less) girls by themselves. Johnson shuns the typical cutesy, smiling stereotypes of children in portraits. "They are complicated in the way people are," she told me in a recent interview, "and often disgruntled." The background features gold leaf markings. "They are scribbles like a secret early language," she said. "I tried to think like them and come up with a scribble that described their personality." Johnson knows her subject well, having grown up with three sisters. "You work together as a combined forced against the world when it's at its best," she said, "but at its worst that same closeness can be used by one against the other." For commissioned works, Johnson typically spends hours getting to know her subjects, and incorporates props and backgrounds that relay something of the essence of the person, their quirks and eccentricities. "I always try to be open to what models bring," she said. "In this series sometimes the younger sisters were sneaking looks at the older ones to see how to act. I could see early hints of rebellion and private jokes." Johnson told me she found the experience of working with children models refreshing. "Kids often lack the emotional self-censoring ability that many adults have on autopilot. That's great to work with." Make Me opens Friday at Artguise Gallery, 590 Bank Street, and continues until June 30.

October 23, 2003 - Eye Magazine Eye Candy David Balzer

KIRSTEN JOHNSON One of Kirsten Johnson's contributions of Hysteria, Buddies in Bad Times' 10-day spree of women's theatre, spoken word, visual art, fashion and film, is "Apple-two," an attractive, figurative oil about innocence and experience. Johnson's enhanced sense of colour and her stylized, just-short-of-photorealistic brushstrokes transform the young girls of her painting into prepubescent icons; the interplay of mischief and earnestness (the girl on the right looks like she's having a jaded epiphany on the virtues of cheating) would be right at home on the cover of an old Judy Blume or Sweet Valley Twins book. It's a clever redrafting of original sin, in which the apple-bite becomes a necessary first step toward sassy, sophisticated womanhood.

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - The Globe and Mail Two feet in the past R.M. VAUGHAN Portraitist Kirsten Johnson has turned a white tube sock and a Stanfield's grey woolly into the subjects of an intriguing suite of paintings that quietly celebrate the comforts of childhood. When Toronto painter Kirsten Johnson fell off her bike three years ago, the last thing on her mind was a new suite of paintings. Left with a mangled hip, she was bedridden for weeks while strung out on painkillers. Naturally, Johnson's mind began to drift, and, after the initial hordes of worried visitors dwindled down to her boyfriend and her parents, her loneliness caused her to retreat into a childlike state of self-indulgence. She began to seek solace in old toys, favourite childhood mo vies, and mushy foods - what she calls the "totems of comfort." Once back on her feet and ready to paint, Johnson began talking to other adults who had undergone traumatic illnesses, and was struck by how intelligent, grown people will suddenly cling to teddy bears, baby-soft blankets and sugary treats as part of their healing process. The resulting series of paintings, Comfort, first shown at Toronto's Zsa Zsa Gallery in 2001, was a disturbing and yet oddly cheery collection of portraits of wounded adults sucking their thumbs, wallowing in pajamas and playing with toys. But one image from Comfort continued to haunt Johnson - that of a young man surrounded by a caressing gaggle of homemade, button-eyed sock puppets. At one point in her convalescence, Johnson says, she had dreamed of hav ing her friends stage a sock-puppet show at the end of her bed - an idea she had nixed because, as she puts it, "I was rapidly using up favours."
Johnson's oil-on-chalkboard giddy: overt infantilism and the purity of nostalgia.	Two years later, Johnson has turned her fever dream into a deliciously strange suite of paintings entitled touchy-feely, and opening Aug. 7 at Toronto's Burston Gallery. Employing her estimable talents as a portraitist, Johnson has crafted over 40 paintings of sock puppets, all in exaggerated poses and expressions - from goofy to malevolent - and each labelled with literary precision.
A puppet attempting to pull off another puppet's eye is called insistent while a puppet making a pass at another is labelled drunkenly amorous. The titles are placed directly on the paintings in chalk, making the exhibition resemble a very smart child's summer-camp scrapbook. Johnson is unapologetic about touchy-feely's overt infantilism. "I'm hardly alone here - there is a purity to nostalgia, because you know how the story ends. That's why so many people find so-called childish things comforting. We get rid of a lot as we get older, go through a toughening up, and maybe that's not an entirely good idea. And I can't do it, can't get rid of everything from my childhood. I wonder where this idea comes from, that we have to get rid of things that once made us happy?" Johnson admits that her two puppet models - a plain white tube sock and that most Canadian of garments, a Stanfield's grey woolly - are, at first glance, difficult to regard as subjects worthy of fine-art portraiture, especially since Johnson has applied the same rigour and meticulousness in her painting of these humble subjects as she would one of her much coveted portraits. "Every once in a while I would stop and ask myself: sock puppets? But I had so much fun making the work, and so much fun getting my friends to play with the puppets, that I kept going. At one point, I was at a restaurant with a bunch of friends and the puppets came out. Within minutes, the whole restaurant was hovering over our table, watching us manipulate these mangy old socks. I realized then that, as toys, the puppets had a kind of seductive simplicity - because when all you have for a toy is a sock, the toy naturally becomes all about you and your imagination." Johnson's enthusiasm for her subjects has paid off. When immersed in the paintings, the viewer begins to see subtle differences between the two characters: and Johnson's almost fanatical attention to detail, to the way the fabric folds, curls in on itself and hangs, like skin off the puppeteers' hands, gradually gives the two worn-out socks distinct personalities and a palpable physicality. What could have been a handicap - hyperrealist applies talents to seemingly mundane subject - instead becomes the method by which Johnson imbues the paintings with life and character. "I've always enjoyed taking the sting out of formal painting. I love the classical style, but hate the stuffiness, the museum feel of that style," she says. "But the process, puppets or people, is the same. I became just as obsessed with accurately recording their emotions as I do with live subjects." "For months," Johnson laughs, "I tried to get them to express co-dependency. I had to work my way through coquettish to mutually apologetic before I got it right." As the interview progresses, I begin to wonder if Johnson is suffering from Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy syndrome, becoming a little too attached to her hosiery pals. "Well, at least I didn't give them names ... although I do think of the tube sock as Her and the woolly as Him, because it's bigger," she says. "But now they're sitting on my studio shelf, looking like they want to be played with again. Or at least washed."

Saturday, August 30, 2003 - Toronto Star Socks speak a thousand words Art By Numbers - PETER GODDARD Three years back, painter Kirsten Johnson found herself in bed, nursing a fractured hip after being hit by a car while she was riding her bike along Brock St. near Queen St. She doesn't remember much about the accident itself. She does remember the recovery. And despite the therapeutic effect from the painkillers she was taking, she was not a happy camper for a while. For one thing, she was lonely. She wanted company. She wanted to be amused, the way it should be when you're a kid and sick in bed. Specifically, she wanted her friends to put on sock puppet shows for her. "The fact is, I don't remember having any sock puppet show when I was a child," says Johnson. "But I'm part of that generation" - she celebrates her 36th birthday tomorrow at the closing of her show at The Burston Gallery - "that grew up with Sesame Street and the Muppets. I loved all those guys. Since then I've loved all do-it-yourself toys." In 2001 she mounted "Comfort," her earlier show to reflect her fascination with childhood revisited at Zsa Zsa gallery, where she showed painted baby toys and a pair of sock puppets. The models for the sock-puppet drawings are - uh, well, sock puppets. Two socks, one a grey work sock with a red stripe, the other a more uptown, genteel all-white sock. In Drunkenly Amorous the pair appear to be mating while in Insistent they're having a good old-fashioned sock fight. Johnson toyed with the idea of bringing her sock models to this show's opening a while back "and maybe write a play for them to be in," she says. "But the socks have been used so much they're falling apart. It would have been too much of a letdown." The specific sock puppet title she begins with isn't always the title that ends up for any particular painting. "Oh, I'd start with a very specific idea," she explains. "I'd want 'paranoia.' But when it was finished I'd think, "no, that's more 'rambunctious' than 'paranoia.' The 'rambunctious' sock had such a feeling of giddiness and complete energy. But then people would come up and say, 'oh, that's not 'rambunctious,' that's whatever.' I've had to learn not to try to control my paintings."
1 Socks: "I find them so charming and I like the fact they're so utilitarian. There's something about childhood here. I think that people are never really finished with their childhood. There's so much more to explore about childhood, so much more to explain. When I first started doing this I remember going out with my friends - we're all in our 30s or 40s - and we'd play with the sock puppets in a restaurant. We'd scream and laugh and the waiter would come by and make sure we weren't drunk I've always worked with emotion. And you get as much emotion out of working with socks as with humans."	Drunkenly Amorous (2003), by Kirsten Johnson
2 Painting with chalk: "Oil paint is my first love. But I wanted something to suggest school and using chalk and blackboards did that. There's also something impermanent working with chalk. That was the most fun. Oil painting is careful work. With chalk, you could rub things out I made all the blackboards as well. It was wood over which I put blackboard paint. And there is something called 'blackboard paint.' You could get a whole can of it and paint your whole room. Part of my studio has blackboard paint." 3 Faces: "With each sock puppet there's something unique and un-human about it. Yet each does express human-like emotion. But then I think we're looking for ourselves everywhere we look, at everything we look at. We look for ourselves in our cats. Human loneliness is pretty big so we want to find ourselves every place, especially in the humble sock." "Touchy-Feely," Kirsten Johnson's paintings of sock puppets, wraps up today and tomorrow at The Burston Gallery, 1092 Queen St. W. (at Dovercourt). The gallery is open noon to 5p.m. today, 1p.m. to 5p.m. tomorrow.

The Globe and Mail, August 23, 2003

GALLERY GOING - Gary Michael Dault Kirsten Johnson at the Burston Gallery Okay, what's cuter - and more grotesque - than a sock puppet? Not much, right? The production and proliferation of Cute, on the other hand, is not perhaps the most promising direction for an artist. It was with something like a heavy heart, therefore, that I finally assayed these surprising sock puppet paintings by Toronto artist Kirsten Johnson (the exhibition is called Touchy Feely, after all). The idea for the show came, Johnson recounts in a gallery statement, from her convalescence in the fall of 2000, after being knocked off her bike by a car. It occurred to Johnson that it would be "cheering" if she could only "convince my friends to come over and entertain me with a sock puppet show" (how many painkillers was this woman being given?). This never happened, unfortunately, so Johnson made the puppets herself. She made two of them anyhow. And given that, as she points out, "her work has always been portrait-based," she set about painting the portraits of her two companionable sock puppets - one has big buttons for eyes while the other sees with two huge wooden beads. This is not very interesting yet. But what Johnson did then is to press the puppets into service as the exemplars of a whole absorbing range of emotional states. Placed against black or green backgrounds reminiscent of school blackboards, these exquisitely painted little woolly characters (who possess a certain Bert and Ernie vaudevillianism) act out - either together or separately - such states of being as "paranoid," "demure," "intense," "co-dependent," "lascivious," "self-absorbed" and what seems like hundreds (the show is very large) of other moods that flesh is heir to. Just so you don't have to guess which emotion or state is being acted out by the puppets, the artist has carefully printed it beside her puppets, in pink chalk. I'm not at all clear about why Johnson uses chalk and blackboard-grounds against which to position her little passion plays. But they sure are charming. And really very skillfully painted. $500-$750. Until Aug. 31,1092 Queen St. W., 416-516-1232.

BEST BET NOW Magazine, November 1, 2000 KIRSTEN JOHNSON'S COMFORT Bunnies, Hawaiian Barbies, dressmakers' Judies, sock puppets: these are all figures of comfort in artist/actor Kirsten Johnson's new exhibition of the same name, Johnson's art has previously been described as "magic realism in paint," and Comfort is no exception. The dozen oil paintings featured in the show are large, striking and walk a line "where the physical landscape is surreal but he emotional landscape is grounded." Apart from Comfort, Johnson's paintings - and the artist herself - can also be seen in the upcoming movie adaptation of Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man. In a brief onscreen appearance, Johnson's character makes an uncomplimentary remark about the art. To see a preview of this show, and catch a glimpse of some of her other portrait work, go to www.kirstenjohnson.com - it's a visually appealing site that provides a great deal of context for her work. Comfort opens at Zsa Zsa Gallery (962 Queen W.) tonight at 7pm. It runs to Nov. 17. The gallery is open WEdnesday to Friday, 1-7pm; Saturday and Sunday 1-6pm.

Bunnyhead by Kirsten Johnson

How to make painting a performance art
Works by Kirsten Johnson, including Valerie B: Portrait of a Canadian Movie Star, show lots of drama	NOW Magazine, May 6, 1999 by Si Si Peñaloza "Kirsten Johnson is a star. She's well known for her dramatic work, most recently in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ and Don McKellar's Last Night. But I don't mean movie star. She's got more star quality than you can capture on celluloid. She has a 'brightness'. And you can see it in her vibrant paintings.
.....Johnson makes local thespians and starlets the subject, or cast. of her work. 'I've got very talented friends, with great faces to boot,' she says coyly. 'They help me bring an abstract idea to life. We share a similar language - I can speak on very emotional terms and they're not frightened by it.' Elaborate set-ups .....I try to find out how she comes up with the elaborate set-ups she's known for. 'I get together with the actors and go through a process of working out different scenarios,' she explains. 'Then we basically do a photo shoot and I work from the montage of pictures, picking and choosing elements that I like.' From the look of this eclectic apartment, it's easy to see why Johnson's often the talk of the green room. She brings a painting from the back and props it up against her old ElectroHome 78s record player. The Love Letter depicts a woman in a ball gown crushing a pomegranate. The characters in her painted dramas strike unnatural, theatrical poses. It's as if Johnson exploits for her own devices the dramatic conventions of the tableau. The result is an image as emotionally charged as any theatrical presentation. This is only one of many areas in which Johnson's experience as an actor crosses over to her position as a painter. Her awareness of the audience differs from that of a painter who's never had to delight an expectant crowd. Her subjects are painted using their eyes and gestures to engage the viewer. After all, they're actors doing what they do best - or perhaps Johnson's brush instinctively makes her subjects active. Seize and arrest ...Her sense of audience also influences how Johnson positions women in her panels. Film theorists have been deconstructing the male gaze for nearly two decades. Johnson builds it up, confronting the gaze head-on. Rather than being chosen for their poetic value, gestures here are intended to actively subvert assumptions about the gaze. It's seize and arrest, to the point where you wonder who's doing the gazing, the subject or the spectator. 'When I first started painting, I was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, but they also filled me with horror - the way women were painted as vacant - blank slates to project upon. I had a love/hate relationship with that. I still love the formality of the paintings, but the female subject's lack of self-possession alienated me.' Plenty of attitude ...In some of her smaller portraits, she's taken a hammer to the pompous gilded-frame idea. Literally. On frame is riddled with nails and covered with tin. Another is wreathed with shiny metal coils. With all their hardware, the paintings have plenty of attitude, much of it directed toward the overserious and formalist old school of oil painting. Especially portraits. Self-Portrait as a Royal Brat is rooted in Johnson's sense of humour. She reclines decadently, mouth in a pout and tongue poised. A thin paintbrush is held idly in her hand as if it were a fashion accessory or magic wand. It's a revealing portrait of an uncompromised artist for whom the footlights never dim. 'I've always considered myself way too much of an extrovert to be just a painter, and way too much of an introvert to be just an actor. One is an inward, solitary art while the other is social and collaborative.'"

Artery, Fall/Winter 1999 from September Season Review by Phil Anderson "20th Century Sideshow (presented by blueprint gallery) featured strong and varied work of 12 visual artists. ...........Upon entering the exhibition the viewer encounters some of the most striking works of the show with Kirsten Johnson's oil on wood panels Self Portrait Post Suckerpunch and Two Out of Three Furies. "

The Twisted Superfreak Times, 1999 "It's bad enough she's strawberry blonde, brilliant, charismatic and funny, but she's the accomplished mistress of two disciplines that require utmost talent and dedication. When not 'wowing' theatre-goers on stage and screen, Kirsten paints. Really paints. Her show of recent work at the Zsa Zsa Gallery (962 Queen St. W.) proves that in the decade since I had the honor of sitting for her, she hasn't been spreading herself too thin. This is meticulous, refined work. Kirsten takes hyper-realistic portraiture a few steps left of center with stylized poses and a blazing impossible pallette, reminiscent of Viennese Successionists like Klimt or Schiele. Fresh tones are particularly exaggerated; electric blues and raw magentas follow the line of muscle and tendon, so, at times, her subjects appear partially flayed. Brush strokes are confident, languorously graceful, yet she can capture the texture of stiff lace, a rough wool carpet or foaming champagne with a brisk stippled effect. From the coquettish 'Portrait of Valerie B.' To the eerie, understated violence of 'The Lobby', theme and mood are varied. 'Red Rage' shows, in almost Biblical composition, the anguish of a dysfunctional family. The contemptuous, tragic gaze with which the woman in 'The Love Letter' confronts the viewer is truly disturbing." by Leslea Keurvorst

Lola - Winter 1999 "Recent Paintings at Zsa Zsa. Kirsten Johnson's great big bold portraits of her friends in the theatre community are painted in stagey, dramatic poses that Johnson has worked up from photographs. She finds all those improbable but real greens and blues and oranges in skin tones and bravely and adeptly attacks complex textures, especially fabrics. The paintings are contained in fabulous home-made frames created out of stuff like nails and twisted metal. ('I cut myself soo many times....', Johnson) 'Self Portrait as a Royal Brat' embodies the humorous, lively, deceptively powerful collection. Note the devil kitty - a disturbing childhood toy. Who says portraits in oils are passé? You go, Kirsten." by Sarah B. Hood

XTRA magazine, 1999

The Globe and Mail, March 5, 1996 (for Book Review of "What Passes for Love") by John Doyle "......Then there are the startling illustration by Toronto artist Kirsten Johnson - in each case a cool, deadpan accompaniment to the story."

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