“What It Means to Learn”

Johanna Jackson & Dana Dart-McLean
September 4th—September 6th, 2015
Opening Friday September 4th 7-9pm 

At the opening, Peter Hernandez, Busy Gangnes, and Nickels Sunshine will dance in a collaboratively choreographed piece, using sculpture by Dana and Johanna.

In addition to their individual work, Johanna Jackson and Dana Dart-McLean have used this opportunity to create collaborative paintings, sculpture, and installation. Each of the works on view engages a similar humor about blurring between representational and functional objects: a sculpture that is a mirror, a painting that is a hat.

What does the skin say?  When is it done?  What does it mean to learn?

Learning is the feeling of your brain changing. It doesn’t only flow in one direction, a lot of learning is forgetting. Out in the world we are taught, and some things we can let in and some things we can’t and a lot of things we shouldn’t—especially since everything is everything. There are forevers of different realities and ways of being, seeing, and making perform constant appearances and flips and dissolves. Making pictures together, we balance across our separateness. We send it out and return with something definite there on the page, some proof, something coming out of the muddiness. A way of learning without mastering, a way of taking the earning out of learning. What do you have left ? Just an L.

Here’s another sentence inspired by democracy.

Collaborative art is generally less economically valued than work made alone or with paid help. Why? What about friendship and equality makes things cheap? We relate to cheap.

Combining various forms of knowing comes naturally. Through somatic, structural, contingent, and tactile ways of being, we register knowing and not knowing with various states of  discomfort and comfort. Preference, style, and habit arise in response. Look, the neck muscles between the shoulders and head are tight. The teacher’s hands direct the student to slightly release. A slight adjustment reconfigures the entire form. Breathing and shifting, the body is always recording and responding. A landscape seen with the eyes registers differently from the way hair apprehends, though pedagogies rarely include hair’s understanding. We might spend so much time doing something stupid if we tried to incorporate that. But maybe we would come up with some very good hairstyles.

Laura Riding Jackson wrote, “I want the time-world removed and in its place to see—nothing.” Mediating the real and the unreal while being together, we wonder what it means to learn. Is it skills we are after?  What skills? Gendered, raced, classed, sexed beings, we navigate webs of interaction accumulating memory and style as an expression of habit. Beyond this, what is unnamed remains as another awareness.

Johanna Jackson is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She has a BA in English Literature and Art History from the University of Maryland and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She is interested in making objects out of feelings. 

Dana Dart-McLean is an artist and art teacher who wants to know what paintings can tell us about mapping sight and memory. She teaches art at Sankofa Academy, a public school in Oakland, CA. She has taught at museums, art centers, community centers, schools, public libraries, and an apothecary. She has an MA in Counseling with a focus on Expressive Art Therapy.