Natasha Johns-Messenger

Natasha Johns-Messenger

Melissa Miles

Natasha JohnsMessenger: Mirrors and Windows

Mirrors and windows were famously invoked by the Museum of Modern Art curator, John Szarkowski, to describe how photographic artists approach their medium either as a tool for self-reflection or a window through which to observe the world around them. Natasha JohnsMessenger’s site-responsive spatial practice allows us to step into the mirror and through the windowpane, transforming these visual framing devices into portals to another experience entirely. This Melbourne and New York based artist has established an international reputation for her architectural interventions and sculptural works that lure us into riddles of optics, embodied experience and space. Variously using lenses, screens, mirrors, light and the existing conditions of exhibition spaces, JohnsMessenger manipulates reflections and lines of sight to immerse us in extraordinary spatial and perceptual conundrums.

The complexity of Johns-Messenger’s work is belied by the elegant simplicity of her aesthetic. The architectural features of the gallery and her own artistic interventions work together to subtly direct where we look and move. Cleverly, Johns-Messenger anticipates our likely path through and around existing architectural elements, and uses our prior experience with simple optical devices to turn the familiar into something quite unexpected. Most of us interact with mirrors every day and are used to looking at their two-dimensional surface and registering depth and space. Yet we know that mirrors can offer both clarity and trickery. For Envelop 2022, Johns-Messenger draws on that comfortable familiarity with mirrored surfaces and puts it to work with a large window that invites gallery-goers to look out to a tree in the McClelland grounds. Picking up on the human scale of the individual glass panels comprising the window, she uses periscope optics, light and mirrors to displace lines of sight and profoundly alter our experience of the gallery space inside and out. In merging the indirect or mediated perception experienced through the mirrors with the more direct perception of the gallery space, Johns-Messenger’s work seemingly absorbs us into an abstract image.

The power of Johns-Messenger’s work is that it shows how space and embodied cognition are enlivened through their interaction. By working at human scale, Johns-Messenger’s perplexing spatial practices are as much the products of the movement of bodies, our height, posture, and the sounds that bounce off surfaces in the gallery as they are about vision. This is a radical departure from the mirrors and windows invoked by Szarkowski, and his focus on looking at the world, or within, with critical distance. In Envelop, the visual world is not ‘out there’ waiting to be represented or apprehended. Rather, this work dramatizes how we are enfolded in the gallery space and the artwork. Johns-Messenger’s spatial interventions thereby create a heightened sense of awareness in viewers that is particularly potent at this historical moment, as we emerge from lengthy periods of isolation in which screens were our primary contact with the outside world. This work celebrates art ‘IRL’, challenging us and significantly elevating our sense of wonder and curiosity about the spaces we inhabit and share with others.

Natasha Johns-Messenger Envelop 2022