“Jeanette Johns’ art is based in observation, an exercise in looking at the world with a special acuteness for two-dimensional transcription and representation of space. The body of works presented in The Weight of the Earth’s Curve surveys the concept of the our planet’s sphericity, drawing inspiration from the tools (plans, maps, and technical drawings) that enabled humans to make sense of this reality.

Johns’ works on paper point to the various fields of research that gave rise to geodesy, namely philosophy, astronomy, mathematics and geometry. The artist is especially interested in the construction of the globe as we know it today, and the inevitable distortion of scale, dimension and distance yielded by its planar projection. Based on this, how can we truly assert that our vision of the world is accurate?

And yet, the fact that we can tell the time of day by the position of the sun, the possibility of celestial navigation, or even our experience of gravity, remind us of the tangible relationship between human existence and the shape of the Earth. Through an approach both empirical and theoretical, Jeanette Johns demonstrates how the truth value we assign to perspective and other optical tricks central to our representation of space is indicative of a deeper need for understanding and “seeing” the world in a material sense.”

Marie-Pier Bocquet, curator forThe Weight of the Earth’s Curve, a solo exhibition at Arprim in January 2017