“A provocative blend of lyricism and scientific scrutiny, perhaps the most exciting aspect of Johnson’s photography is that it tugs photography away from the gravitational pull of Euclidean documentation – which has dominated the field since its beginnings and prods it towards new and ambitious aesthetic and intellectual goals”.
— Christopher Finch

Artist Jay Mark Johnson produces photographic images that challenge the norms of perception.  Throughout his career, in work spanning the disciplines of drawing and painting, filmmaking, performance, architecture, and photography, he has made visible the intersection of human nature
and society.  Johnson studied architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City. Through the early 1980s, his associations with architects Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi and Lebbeus Woods enabled him to explore questions of representation and time in both built and conceptual architecture. During this period the Museum of Modern Art, NYC acquired his model reconstruction of Ivan Leonidov’s 1927 Dom Narkomjaztpromp. He was also commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute to reconstruct Buckminster Fuller’s 1927 Dymaxion House. Later, that piece was also acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

For the remainder of the ‘80s, Johnson was engaged in performance art, collaborating with Robbie McCauley, Lindzee Smith, V-Effect and others on performances at Theater for a New City, Laight Again Club, Pyramid Club, Henry Street Settlement, and The Kitchen, in New York; and at Seward Hall UCLA, and L.A.C.E., in Los Angeles. He collaborated, as well, with visual artists including Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin and Jimmie Durham.

It was during this period that Johnson began his ongoing political activism, co-founding an alternative television collective, reporting and writing for the Pacifica Network (broadcast radio), and producing graphic work, including the “Postcard Action” series, which is in the collections of the Smithsonian
Institution and the Art Institute of Chicago.  In the late 1980s, Johnson moved to Central America where he co-founded two more television collectives in Mexico and El Salvador, at the height of political unrest in those countries. He wrote, directed and produced television campaigns for the political organization, the FMLN, progressively mastering digital video technology.

At the end of 1991, Johnson returned to Los Angeles, where he eventually became a cinema director with broad experience in visual effects production, having supervised, directed or otherwise contributed to the computer generated imagery for nearly a dozen major studio films and television series, including The Matrix, Titanic, Moulin Rouge, Tank Girl, Outbreak, White Oleander, and music videos for Michael Jackson, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others.

Having discovered the many ways that a limited understanding of human nature can hinder the advancement of progressive causes, he devoted two years to graduate study in Linguistic Anthropology and Biological Anthropology at UCLA. Additional years of study focused on reading in the cognitive
sciences.  His current SPACETIME photographic series began with rudimentary experiments in 2005.

Over the course of this project he increasingly applies the full range of his experiences, from visual arts and cinema to studies in the anthropological and cognitive sciences. Work from this period is in the permanent collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Langen Foundation, Hombroich, Germany, the Peter Klein Museum Kunstwerk, Eberdingen, Germany, the collection of Michael G. Wilson, the Milken Family Foundation, Santa Monica and the Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Boston.

The artist was born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Since 1996 Johnson has resided intermittently in Paris, Antwerp, Rome and rural Italy.
He currently lives and works in Venice, California.