Cloaked in the artistic tradition of still life, LaVonda Josett Johnson, tells her story of faith and intimacy through 22 symbolic photographs viewable on the 6th floor of the Secor Building starting July 13.
In her first exhibition as a photographer, the daytime administrative analyst for the city of Toledo, curated her own wisdom over the past 53 years of her life into moments.
“The best images to me, are when people are not paying attention,” Johnson said. “They’re being their authentic self. And that was the one thing that I, as a child, understood that I could not do.”
Johnson explores concepts difficult to explain with words, including a sense of familiarity, where full relationships are distilled in pictures of seemingly plain items.
As a child, Johnson said, “I was hidden,” because she grew up in a charismatic denomination of the church, hostile to homosexuality, run by her aunt, something she now refers to as a, “cult.”
“‘You’re cursed!’ She [Johnson’s aunt] looked at me and said, ‘You are cursed from the top of your head to the bottom of your soles of your feet, and the only way that you can be delivered is if you give to God’s vessel.’”
At the time, Johnson, who was raised Christian, believed she was cursed because of her “secret sin of lesbianism.” And as a young teenager, people didn’t know she was gay, but these words scared Johnson none-the-less, causing her to donate many personal items to her aunt’s church as penance.
Johnson’s mother intervened, and a 16-year-old Johnson confronted her aunt. Unfortunately, the talk did nothing for the teen trying to figure out the world. Her items were already gone, and it appeared to her that the sacrifice was pocketed by her aunt, instead of giving to God.
“I gave her everything that was valuable to me,” Johnson said.
Afterwards, Johnson felt betrayed by the church, “I was really, a very angry, woman,” she said. And she began to explore the world outside of the Christian tradition, “I was more interested in finding out about who I was.”
In her work Johnson, who attends church regularly now, while also maintaining confidence in who she is, communicates to her audience how she resolved the cognitive dissonances of her youth.
Beyond the controversy of coming out to religiously unsupportive family members, Johnson seeks to communicate past the strife in relationships and resonates on the impact of love that transcends disagreements.
“We were talking,” Keith Corder, the building manager of the Secor Building, located at 425 Jefferson Ave., said. “And I saw her work and I thought it was really, really super good.”
“Most of the still life work is what I really got into.”
In Johnson’s studio she presented a picture of leaves arranged in an overflow of emotion, representing the artist’s father, and another picture of blueberries, piercing with their deep hue, representing a grandparent.
“This breath, you can’t see it,” but “You can feel it escape us,” Johnson said, conecting the escape of the breath and the breakdown of the body into earth as a link of every person with something greater and perpetual.
“I am never alone,” she said. “Wherever I go those that have gone before me are with me.”
In her work Johnson carries with her the people who are part of her, and imbued emotion is inescapable in her work.
“It’s realism slash surrealism,” Corder said.
The sixth floor of the Secor Building is an outlet artist tenants to display their work, and Corder encouraged Johnson to do just that.
“One 30-day show with an opening,” he said, which will happen from 6 to 8 p.m. July 13. “And they [tenants] can use the gallery. We take no commission.”
Prints of Johnson’s work as well as some of the artworks on display will be available for purchase.
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