Coco Johnson

Coco Johnson examines the nude body, cast through a contemporary feminist lens. Challenging her conservative upbringing, Coco's concepts draw on her experiences as a woman relating to body, gender, fetishism, queerness, visibility and most importantly the sport of synchronized swimming. While providing the framework for societal critique, ‘synchro’ is used as a metaphor to analyze traditional gender norms, body hierarchies, and gender power dynamics. Her personal relationship to synchro crafted the way she views the empowered female body and how it interacts with other beings and manipulates space. Coco strives to reclaim the body, its worth, and to renounce any personal convictions of otherness. 

As an interdisciplinary artist, Coco's mediums range from ceramic, photography, painting, textiles, and even water. Her work draws on aspects of the surrealist movement utilizing the creativity of absurd imagery and odd arrangement of objects. By layering unconventional body parts together and creating intriguing formations with the body, Coco summons the surreal, and the way the bodies interact and interconnect with their surroundings. The fragmented anatomical configurations allude to elements of visual abstraction and reference the bodily arrangements or patterns observed in synchronized swimming. By grabbing and pulling sections of the body and collaging them together into a visual object, the work becomes centered around the choreographed form and relieved from the hierarchy of body identity. Ultimately, the final object is of bodily origin but is represented in a way that exerts a disconnect from the self.