Artist Bio:
Wade Johnston is a multidisciplinary visual artist living in the central United States. With a background in graphic design and illustration, and formal training in painting and print making his work uses photography along with traditional materials to create abstract narratives for the viewer to decipher.
Wade attended the University of Kansas studying mechanical engineering only to decide at the end of his fourth year before graduating that it wasn’t where his true passions were. After an eighteen month break, he returned to school to pursue a degree in Fine Art with an emphasis on painting, print making, mixed media and at the time the emerging digital field. Post graduation he continued to work on his personal artworks while supporting himself as a graphic designer and illustrator while earning a masters degree in design communication from Pratt. Over the next 30 years he has continued to develop his visual style letting it evolve while continuing to look at pop culture, the medium.
Artist Statement:
My work tends to focus on a loose narrative that revolves around memory and what I look at as the perception of the American Dream and how it has been presented in the news, the media, entertainment, and publishing especially from the 1960s moving forward. How we tend to look at or remember things a certain way, and how that memory shifts over time, but isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of the reality that was. Images are built up using found photos, as well as photos I have taken, combined with painted marks and drawn lines that are scanned and layered into the images to create either visual tension, or help direct the viewers eye to specific places in the composition.The titles of the work are usually a mash up of different sections of sentences lifted from magazines, newspapers, song lyrics, or lines from movies and TV. They are cut up and reassembled to obscure the meaning of the work even more. There is no defined narrative or story to the works.
