About
Elyse Johnson is a Chicago-based performance and video artist working in experimental media and game development. Her practice investigates digital embodiment and fractured subjectivity through immersive storytelling and video. Johnson is a 2015 recipient of the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship which supported her performance series The Silver Screen. Johnson has exhibited internationally and is featured in EMERGENCY INDEX: An Annual Document of Performance Practice, Volume 8. (2019) and Volume 9. (2020). She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design.
Johnson's practice investigates human progress and the consequences of rapid advancement, both real and imagined. Her performance work uses post-human character design and centers characters who are afflicted, effected, and burdened by our increasingly precarious relationship to technology. Her practice is fueled by a spirit of irreconcilability and the allure of spaces in which conflicting ideas, meanings, and realities coexist and inform each other. As the veil thins between real and other, we might embark on a journey of collective hallucination; a never-ending crescendo towards the epic.