By JOANNA CLAY / STAFF WRITEROC Register
Brian Johnson, an art teacher at Valencia High School in Placentia, is one of those who created a piece just for the show.
Johnson, who is finishing his MFA at Cal State Fullerton, spent nearly 15 hours inside the gallery, panting a mural on an exhibit wall – not with a brush, but with mat board. He had a concept, but at the end of the day, had no idea what would end up on the wall.
“He wasn’t using any reference photos, that just came from his brain, which was crazy,” Mercer said of watching Johnson work. “The first couple strokes you could instantly see perspective and depth.”
After the show’s close in March, the mural will be painted over.
Johnson has another piece in the show, an immersive installation called “Space 44” that conjures his childhood, with a replica of the crystal matrix table from TV show “Land of the Lost,” loungers on AstroTurf on a wall and a projection of the moon. It’s inspired by his teenage years in a Glendora mobile home park, where he was fascinated by artificial and synthetic materials and how that distorts the idea of real and fake.
“It looks like a really cheesy sci-fi movie set in a lot of ways,” he said of the installation. “People love that because they want to interact with it. They want to be inside of it.”