Sonja John

Visual Description: Mylar paper has been dyed, cut, and placed on the windows. The transparent nature of the material allows for light to pass through it, illuminating the manipulations made by the artist. Utilizing turquoise blue hues, the stencils mimic flora and fauna. 

Visual Description: On a green wall with stenciled pops of color, two paintings are hung side by side. The paintings depict stylized versions of plants native to Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Philippines. The left canvas utilizes bright greens, oranges, and yellows. The right canvas builds off of this, incorporating deeper oranges and greens, as well as  fabric and paper elements layered onto the surface. 

Curatorial Description: Sourcing images from her family’s archive, Sonja John’s mixed media installation overlays photos, stencils, and pigment—simultaneously obscuring and revealing references to her multi-hyphenate heritage. With lineages rooted in Trinidad, the Philippines, and Jamaica, John collages silhouettes of jade vines and other flora found on the islands in an allusion to the migration of people and plants due to colonial exploits.

As a first generation New Yorker, John locates her identity not in a specific place, but within the sensations between these places—as experienced through trips to her family’s homelands, stories shared, and food tasted. This fluidity is echoed in her cutout mylar breezeblocks which shift in response to air and movement, and allow light to move through, resisting a set boundary or border. Arranging home is not a country in a ground of water, a space in-between without land, John calls in the narrative of migration (forced and otherwise) and further expands upon the installation’s title.

The dyed screen prints with acrylic and crayon additions on view diagonally to this installation complete John’s contribution to this exhibition. Balat ng Saging (Morado) and Balat ng Saging (One Hand Bandit) feature abstract imagery of bananas, emblems of racialized identity and commodity, in addition to other flora found in the artist’s family’s gardens in Jamaica and the Philippines. In John’s hands, the mixing of materials and the abstracting of plant forms speak to the boundlessness of queer and trans people of color. In the context of The Way You Want It this body of work contributes to the larger theme of creating spaces and communities of belonging.

About

Sonja John is a queer, first generation, Bronx-based artist, educator, and curator. John's interdisciplinary practice explores cultural, botanical, and material hybridity through paintings, textiles, printmaking, and site-responsive installations that reference plant forms and vernacular architecture across equatorial zones. These motifs investigate diasporic longing and nostalgic fictions of the Caribbean built from history, memory, and family lore. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Her contributions to museum education have been featured at the RISD Museum and Hyperallergic. John has performed at Jazz At Lincoln Center and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her visual art has been featured on I Like Your Work Podcast, n+1 magazine, Seeing Color Podcast with Zhiwan Cheung and Them. John was awarded the ChaNorth Artist Residency Young Artist Fellowship Award in 2022, and received the General Fellowship residency award for The Studios at MASS MoCA in 2023.