Poppy Johnson (b. 1949, New York City) has had a long career as an artist, both in NYC and in Greenport, where she has lived for over forty years. However, this exhibition is not a retrospective. A retrospective would include references to and documentation of the performances, installations, collaborations and other mostly lost ephemeral activities which were the early emphasis of Johnson’s career. Also lost are many paintings and drawings due to moves, divorces, a flood, a chronic lack of designated studio space to call her own, and Johnson’s reluctance to assign value to material objects. But some early pieces remain, and Johnson continues to make art.
So, instead, this exhibition is an introspective.

Poppy Johnson: Introspective includes a range of sculptures, assemblages, drawings, paintings, photographs and collages that reflect particular moments in time. For Johnson, looking at pieces she made in her early twenties beside those she made recently is “a way of thinking about what is interesting, what is beautiful, what changes, what persists.” Certain themes recur in this body of works—the importance of grids and repositories, of words and letters, of music and magic. Indeed, the idea of the artist as a magician, as a preserver of the past and a pauser of time is prevalent. Several Museum assemblages contain objects that Johnson has collected over many years; these are contained in tiny rooms, giving the works an Alice-in-Wonderland-like quality. Johnson hopes to “stop your eye” with these pieces, providing a sense of pause that is also intrinsic to her Music sculptures.

The alchemical capabilities of the artist—a potent idea embodied by the classical myth of Pygmalion’s living statue—is explored in the Creature assemblages on display in the cabinet in the adjacent corridor. Similarly, Johnson plays with the possibilities of self-transformation in the photographic series Hatshepsut. Having recently rediscovered photos of herself at age eighteen, Johnson decided, over fifty years later, that she preferred to take on the guise of a bearded female pharaoh.

With Introspective, Johnson looks back and looks forward. The included works engage with the inevitability of passing time, but they also suggest the potency of preservation and pause.