Scott Johnson: Uncommon Ground, The Gallery at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara, October 30 – December 31, 2021

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present Uncommon Ground, a solo exhibition project by Scott Johnson for the Gallery at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara. The exhibition will be on view October 30 – December 31, 2021. 

There will be a public reception to celebrate the opening on Saturday, October 30, 2021, from 5-7pm. 

Uncommon Ground features recent works that incorporate collage and three dimensional surfaces in an array of experiments in shape and form. Johnson, a voracious visual consumer of contemporary culture, creates layer upon layer of image, paint, and board to create dynamic and often colorful compositions. Our world of glossy magazines, models, actors, political figures and the anonymous are embedded, torn, and turned every which way. One experiences his artwork in almost a bricolage fashion, as disparate materials are brought together in an idiosyncratic visual language of his own making. Johnson references and pays homage to many artists and cultural producers past and present all the while steadfastly building his own path forward. 

Scott Johnson was born in California and educated at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley (BA in Architecture) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Master in Architecture), Johnson worked variously at The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, the Los Angeles and San Francisco offices of Skidmore Owings Merrill, and the office of Philip Johnson and John Burgee in New York City. Joining Pereira Associates in Los Angeles in 1983 as Principal and Design Director, he and William Fain acquired the firm now known as Johnson Fain in 1988. 

Recent exhibitions of his artwork include, It’s Art If I Say It’s Art. Otherwise It’s Not, Eastern Projects Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Looking at Architecture, Porch Gallery, Ojai, CA, and HÔTEL: A Concert Exhibition, Ojai, CA.

In addition to designing nearly 100 built projects in the past 20 years, Johnson has also taught and lectured at various universities. He served as Director of the Master of Architecture Programs at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture from 2004 through 2007. 

He is the author of the publications Uncommon Ground:  Notes on the Visual Arts + Architecture (2021), Essays on the Tall Building and the City, as well as Performative Skyscraper Tall Building Design Now, Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper, Tectonics of Place: The Architecture of Johnson Fain, and The Big Idea: Criticality and Practice in Contemporary Architecture.

The Gallery at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara is a unique public-private partnership that seeks to raise funds to support the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s Ojai Institute artist residency and education programs. You may learn more online at www.theojaiinstitute.org and www.cgbfoundation.org.