Ted Johnson
Artist's Statement
That big lake to the east of us--it's how we orient ourselves in Chicago. In my case, this goes back about seventy-five years, to when my grandfather and I used to take our walks along the Evanston beachfront. Sometimes, across the water, we'd watch all those faraway streetlights flickering on at dusk, southward along Lake Shore Drive.
Since then I've snapped lots of pictures, but I guess it took Richard and his remarkable teaching community to show me how much I didn't know I didn't know. My attention has now returned to that lakefront, and while my lens has stumbled across numerous curious things to be seen there, more and more I really found myself peering beyond--outward and upward to the water and the sky and the shifting vapors overhead. (And since life follows art, I seem to notice those clouds now more than ever.)
The lake is always a magnet for Chicagoans. I keep remembering the first chapter of Moby Dick, when Ishmael describes the attraction of the sea for the dwellers of Manhattan, staring out to sea: "thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries." He finds something magical about the liquid part of the world. Take "the most absent-minded of men...stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region."
We have water here, enough to feed our deepest imaginings. For this exhibition, my wife Marcia and I pointed our cameras in opposite directions but perhaps found similar things: she probing the minute distances within those minuscular watery creatures--her incredible shells--and I, pondering the beckoning spaces that lie about us where the land ends and the water begins. My grandfather would have liked that.
