Charlotte Johannesson at Hollybush Gardens

“THE TARGET IS DESTROYED”; “Reflex”; “International Rotation”; “Save As Artwork? Sure / No.” The phrases inscribed throughout the floor of Charlotte Johannesson’s work counsel a terrain divided into inventory phrases and coded traces. Within the abridged show of her work at Hollybush Gardens, composed of quite a few textile hangings, prints, and digital slides, Johannesson presents an image-world of jagged traces and pixelated icons, knotted collectively by thread and code. Primarily working between the loom and pc, Johannesson finds an aesthetic and technical resonance between the 2 machines, tracing the logic of the latter again to the previous. The tessellated patterns of landscapes, animals, and figures that often seem in her work migrate between media and mutate. A plotter print depicts a modified world map; a determine is split into bytes and stitched patterns; and as threads dangle and loosen, the nice and cozy, comfortable contact of wool transforms into an invite to conspiracy.

Buying and selling in her loom for an Apple II within the late Nineteen Seventies, Johannesson and her companion Sture Johannesson established the Digital Theatre, Scandinavia’s first pc graphics studio. Behind the gallery, a big display screen presents a choice of artworks made there on a timer, biking via imagery of serrated, harsh edges and 8-bit symbols. By way of these renderings of digital zones and coarse surfaces, Johannesson interprets the vicissitudes of a visible tradition that surrounds and swallows us. It’s the construction of the grid that’s brilliantly reproduced and thought via in her work, the grid into which we’re all plugged.

— Dan Ward