Name Natasha Johns-Messenger Role Filmmaker | Movies Blackwood | |
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Natasha Johns-Messenger is an Australian born conceptual artist and filmmaker, who lives and works in New York after winning the Green Card lottery in 2005. Johns-Messenger is best known for her large-scale site-determined installations that examine spatial perception and light. Her work is a complex process of imitation, illusion and trickery, often activated by architectural interventions and optical physics.
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Johns-Messenger's practice includes photography, digital painting and sculpture.
Background
Johns-Messenger is the Great-granddaughter of Australian Rugby legend Dally Messenger and sister of singer Julia Messenger. Johns-Messenger's mother, Catherine Marie Johns, is a poet and novelist in Australia and her works have been published in literary journals including Meajin and Island Magazine. Her father, Dally Messenger III is a published author noted specifically for his book Ceremonies and Celebrations and for his general contribution to the Australian civil celebrant movement.
Career
Johns-Messenger employs the principles of architecture, film and the visual arts to produce a new experiential "live" sculptural framework. She directly responds to the site as a pictorial object and creates representations or abstractions from the original architecture. Johns-Messenger examines concepts that are inherent to the Light and Space movement, which emerged in Southern California in the 1960s by artists James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Doug Wheeler. The artist physically cuts into real space and uses material devices such as, periscopic mirrors, live video projections and architectural mimicry to produce large-scale installations. Her interest in quantum physics, mathematics, seriality and geometry is also implemented within her practice. Johns-Messenger critically examines the role of the body in space and her primary concern with altering ordinary "ways of seeing" and the "poetics of space" (to borrow a phrase from Gaston Bachelard) began during early childhood, where she spent days sketching, conceptualizing and photographing shapes from ordinary objects.
Johns-Messenger commenced her art practice as a painter, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1994, with First Class Honors, and in 2000 she completed an MFA, Masters of Fine Arts, from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited at major institutions including, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, and the Contemporary Centre for Photography, Melbourne. In 2012 Johns-Messenger completed an MFA in Film at Columbia University, New York, marking a shift into narrative film, where Johns-Messenger combines her interest with abstraction and the moving image into real time."Blackwood" her final graduate film at Columbia won numerous awards at the 2012 Columbia University Film Festival, including the Alumni Award for Best Film, National Board of Review Motion Pictures Award and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Best Director Award. Blackwood went on to premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival and has been featured in 40 film festivals and won numerous awards. Her first graduate film, "Off-Ramp" won Best Student Film and Best Actress at the LA International Underground Film Festival.
Exhibitions
Johns-Messenger has been curated into major international group exhibitions alongside artists such as Dan Graham, James Turrell and Lawrence Weiner. In 2009/10 Johns-Messenger was commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund, for her work ThisSideIn and in 2010 created Recollection for No Longer Empty, New York at Governor’s Island and was a studio resident at the ISCP in New York (International Studio and Curatorial Program) under the Australia Council for the Arts, studio residency program. In 2007, she won the Den Haag Sculptuur Rabo Bank Prize presented to her by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and in 2006 Johns-Messenger won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture with her then collaborative group OSW- Open Spatial Workshop (Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell and Terri Bird).
Johns-Messenger's exhibitions have taken place in Japan, Bogota, China, The Netherlands, Taiwan and USA. Her public works can be seen all over the world, with her most recent work Alterview, which was commissioned by Percent For Art and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, permanently located at Hunters Point, New York. Her recent exhibitions also include, Yellow, 2011, at ACCA, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Australia; Through to You, "Freedom-American Sculpture" Den Haag, The Netherlands; Of Water," 2008, GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art), Brisbane Australia; ISCP Open Studio Exhibition, ISCP, New York and Trappenhuis (Stairwell) Installation, Den Haag Sculptuur, Escher Museum, Netherlands; NEW06 at ACCA; Primavera 2004, MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney); and Drift at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.