{"id":70552,"date":"2022-08-02T11:44:21","date_gmt":"2022-08-02T15:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peabody.jhu.edu\/?page_id=70552"},"modified":"2025-02-28T15:05:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T20:05:14","slug":"explosive-art","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/peabody.jhu.edu\/life-at-peabody\/career-services\/student-alumni-stories\/creative-wire\/explosive-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Aug. 2, 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

Explosive Art: An Inside Look at the Creation of Rush Johnston’s Making a Mess<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

August 2, 2022 | by Rush Johnston
Edited by C<\/em>hristina Manceor<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you do when the world around you is in ruins? Try to rebuild, or contribute to the rubble?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

March 2020\u2014an extended spring break, or so we thought. We were sent away from school for a short vacation, only to remain remote for the next six to ten months. All of a sudden, I didn\u2019t have 20 square feet of space anymore, let alone a studio in which to process my grief or keep up my craft. Zoom classes became our new normal and they were impossible in my living room. I was at a loss with dance, coming up empty any time I tried to move and unable to access my traditional practice, so I started painting. I needed an artistic outlet and painting was the most accessible form even though I knew next to nothing about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 I dove into this new world of visual art by creating abstract and figurative works, large and small, yet something was still missing. I was making work, but I<\/em> wasn\u2019t in it. So I took a canvas into my front yard and started dancing on it, painting with my feet as I improvised. It was a cathartic experience and filled the hole I\u2019d been feeling throughout the initial months of the pandemic. It was new and exciting and I couldn\u2019t get enough. I performed on Instagram and Facebook, sharing my dancing paintings with the FUSE<\/a> student group and the wider internet audience. This was the first experience that made me stop and think about cross-disciplinary artistic practices in ways that I had never seen on the American proscenium stage, and it was just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Whirlwind, 2020. Danced acrylic on canvas board. Watch video<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Though COVID-19 has been extremely detrimental to traditional arts, it has also been a genesis for some digital art forms and other avant-garde styles. I looked to creators pioneering these new forms as I continued to question my current art form. What ways had I been bound to tradition in my craft? What room was there to grow, to explore? It struck me that I would have never been allowed to paint through dance on stage, and I began to wonder what else would be \u201cprohibited\u201d from my world of \u201cfine art.\u201d So often there are administrative barriers and economic challenges standing in the way of avant-garde work. I wasn\u2019t sure exactly what my final project would look like, but I knew I wanted to create art that reflected the world around me, art with grit and grime and chaos. Around this time, I was also asked to begin planning for my capstone project, the project that would sum up my entire Peabody experience and showcase my point of view as a creator, choreographer, and dancer. I continued to question the fine art world and the barriers that often prevent me from making the art I felt called to create\u2014art that was messy. So often fine art has a sense of refinement around it, a proscenium to perform in. It\u2019s prim and proper and in a box. I love my classical roots and am so thankful for my study of traditional styles at Peabody, but I have a hunger for something new. So I dared to create it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I continued to imagine this capstone project, I kept dreaming of art that was actively messy, chaotic, and almost out of control\u2014art that couldn\u2019t be tamed by the institution or the social constructs it had to answer to. I knew I wanted to combine artistic styles and push boundaries of myself and the systems I was a part of. Thus Making a Mess<\/em> was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine the breaking of a vase, the smell of citrus wafting through the air, a bathtub full of milk, paint being flung on every surface, and the ability to walk through and see it all up close and personal. That<\/em> is Making a Mess<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Julia Asher<\/a>, BFA 2022. Photo by eAndrew Murray<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Making a Mess<\/em> at its core is a gallery show that subverts common expectations around concert dance in order to question the systems \u201cfine art\u201d exists within. In this installation, dancers were positioned in vignettes throughout a gallery space that audience members could meander through, making the experience more intimate, three-dimensional, and engaging than works set on a traditional proscenium stage. Through experimental processes including scored improvisation and authentic movement practices, the dancers were able to develop their characters over the course of the creative process. This looked like hour-long sessions of character embodiment and improvised interactions as a method of further researching the work. The dancers worked with physical materials that are often not seen in traditional dance spaces, such as paint, fruit, and milk, as well as subject material that is often viewed as taboo in the dance world and its institutions. Many of these subject matters such as queerness, mental illness, and sensuality are permissible in other art areas like television and visual art but have been strongly discouraged in the concert dance world as a further enforcement of elitism. Making a Mess<\/em> posed questions around the social systems concert dance exists within, including class, race, and gender identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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