About
Elyse Johnson is a Chicago-based performance and video artist working in game development. Her practice investigates surveillance, autonomy, and digital embodiment as they intersect with female subjectivity and the ruin of reality. Johnson is a 2015 recipient of the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship which funded in part 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.