Cassandra Johnson
US, born Santa Fe, NM 1978
Cassandra Johnson is a curator and the Owner / Director of Sohn Fine Art in Lenox, MA. Johnson founded the company in 2011 and runs all departments of the business, including curating featured exhibitions – www.sohnfineart.com. Johnson exhibits her own artwork world-wide. She has been published in several books and was the main contributing photographer for Window on the Park—New York's Most Prestigious Properties On Central Park, published by Images Publishing. She graduated from the New School in Manhattan with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Photography.
Classically trained in the arts from an early age, Johnson experimented with many mediums and discovered her passion for photography in her early twenties. Photography based, she captures her images in the natural world then applies pastel, watercolor and pencil to her prints, creating contemplative mixed media works.
Growing up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now calling the Berkshires in western Massachusetts home, Johnson has a strong connection to the mountains, but has always been drawn to water, which is a recurring theme in her work. Fascinated by its ever-moving, ever-changing nature, Johnson is captivated by water’s capacity to elicit stillness and strength. Like our emotions, its form is always affected by its surrounding environments, both inner and outer. It is both a mirror and a vessel of depth and can alter our perceptions of the “real”. Scientists have referred to having contact with the ocean as “blue space” which provokes feelings of peace and calmness. That “blue space” actually changes the way your brain reacts to its environment. It is said that it triggers your mind like meditation, allowing you to tune everything else out and reflect on what you need to focus on. Using water a s a metaphor for life, Johnson’s work focuses on how turbulence and peacefulness can co-exist just as in the ebb and flow of life, one can be found in the other. Johnson’s most recent body of work “Thalassophile” was photographed in Antigua, Mexico, Bahamas and around the US. These images are created utilizing multiple, in-camera, long exposures.
In 2012, she released “A Sea Feeling in the Mountains” motivated by 19th century artists and writers who found inspiration in the Berkshire region and its visual and metaphorical connection to the sea. Johnson followed in the footsteps of Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau (amongst others) by hiking the same paths, visiting their homes, and studying their works, photographing each environment with the pursuit of a larger meaning and interpretation. Just like the philosophers that inspired her, Johnson’s images reflect queries into humanity, identity and a quest for a larger meaning.
