A New Dimension at Meow Wolf Santa Fe by Artist Jess Johnson

Is home the place you were born? Is it the place you end up the longest? Or is home where you are physically and mentally during a specific time of your life? For New Zealand-born artist Jess Johnson, home has been over a dozen residencies and creative spaces across our planet. 

This past year, Jess has been artist-in-residence in Roswell, New Mexico at “The Gift of Time.” Additionally, she’s been working with Meow Wolf Santa Fe on the newest installation at House of Eternal Return titled, Necro Techno Flesh Complex. We sat down with Jess to talk about reality loops, Roswell, and reconstructed language.

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MW: Share with us how you first learned of Meow Wolf or how you began this project? What were your initial feelings or perceptions when you first visited House of Eternal Return?

JJ: Visiting Meow Wolf mostly felt like I was time traveling - going back to being a child. It was a strange type of interaction, as I wasn’t really in the moment, but instead imagining how I would respond to the experience as a kid. For context, I grew up in a small beachside town in New Zealand pre-internet. There wasn’t any access to art beyond what I found in books and I didn’t set foot in a gallery or museum until I was an adult. So, I just kept imagining what impact visiting a place like Meow Wolf would have had on my ten-year-old brain. Like being catapulted into a universe of possibility. The inverse hypothetical is that growing up in small town isolation can also activate your imagination to go really deep. But, I couldn’t help being wistful for having my ten-year-old mind totally blown.

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MW: Can you share insight about the name, Necro Techno Flesh Complex?

JJ: The text and titles in my artwork don’t really have overt meanings. I don’t have a glossary mapped out. Or a dictionary. Or a spell check. It’s just grubbing around in the dark for words that smell or fit right.

One of my all-time favorite books is Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world that is written in this strange re-constructed language. In the book, a new world has been formed from the wreckage of the old. Language itself has been shattered and put back together. This idea has been really influential to me in terms of the text I use in my drawings. The language of my artwork is evolving at the same time as the imagery. If you want to build a new world, you need a new language to describe it.

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MW: You said your room in Meow Wolf is like a real world manifestation of the environments you create in your drawings. Does your creative process always begin with drawings?

JJ: Yes, the drawings are how I build the world and all the different manifestations of my artwork (installations, digital animations, fashion, etc.) come out of the drawings. I don’t like to plan things too much. It’s a slow emergence of imagery and ideas that arise during the drawing process. Time and labor is an important part of the work. The long hours spent staring at paper and making hundreds of repetitive marks allows my mind to get to a place where the elements of the world begin to morph and fit together in new arrangements. The images couldn’t happen quickly. It's more of a slow dredging process.

I like seeing the presence of the human hand in whatever medium the work ends up being. It’s important to me that the animations and installations still retain this drawn, human quality. If the world were created entirely digitally it would be a really cold place. Making the human hand visible in the Meow Wolf installation via the mosaics and hand-crafted columns seeds it with a small life-force. It attracts the psyche instead of repelling it, as digital worlds can have a tendency to do.

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MW: Necro Techno Flesh Complex encompasses multiple dimensions, so it’s interesting to think about how you’re transforming 2D into 3D and video. How does this installation feel different than others you’ve done?

JJ: I’m always trying to move my art off the page and into the ‘real world’. But my efforts are always constricted by whatever I can achieve with my own labor, budget and skillset. So, this installation is different in the level of detail and complexity that the Meow Wolf team was able to contribute.

It’s always seemed a logical step for me to extend the fictional world of my drawings into physical space. For me, the room environment makes the fictional world of the drawings heavier, like the world has its own gravitational pull. If I am somehow able to render the drawings and environments with enough detail and internal logic that feeds back on itself, I’ll be able to create a reality loop that will spark it to life. I guess that's how most batshit belief systems start.

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MW: That sounds like a reality loop worth exploring! When visitors come to Meow Wolf and experience your art, what feelings or emotions do you think it will prompt within them?

JJ: I wouldn’t ever want to try and control the responses people have to my artwork. That's entirely up to them. I hardly know what it's about, so it's not like I’m even in a position to tell someone what to think. I also think the room environments at Meow Wolf can work in a sneaky way. They can function as seductive, sensory stage sets, but the real work is underneath the candy coating. Somehow, there is a transference that happens inside people's minds as they wander through, and they think whatever they think and bring their own interpretations.

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MW: Where is your next adventure? Do you think you’ll come back to New Mexico?

JJ: I’m actually coming back to Roswell in January to set up a more permanent base. It makes me uncomfortable to say this because I am scared it's just a romantic fiction, but I’d like to make New Mexico my home. I haven’t really been settled anywhere for years and have been bouncing around from one artist residency or another. ‘Home’ has been a pretty loose term for decades. 

Spending one year in Roswell at the RAIR residency was the longest I’ve stayed in one place. Previously, when it would get to the end of a residency, I would already have mentally checked out and would be eager to get to the next thing. But in Roswell, I discovered I wasn’t ready to leave. A lot of it has to do with the landscape which activated something really good and peaceful in me. And the benefits of living in a small community. I was really able to get to know people on a deeper level and there are some wonderfully eccentric and special people in Roswell.

Previously, I thought it was important that as an artist I be somewhere in the thick of it, like New York. For me, there are too many distractions in cities and I think I’ve realized that I don’t do well mentally in them. I also don’t care enough about organic food markets or the art and culture you get in cities. I’d rather be in a quiet remote environment where I can go deeper inside my own head without all the chatter.

Wander through and explore Necro Techno Flesh Complex inside House of Eternal Return starting August 16, 2024. And to learn more about Jess Johnson, her works and future journeys go to jessjohnson.org and follow her Instagram @flesh_dozer.