Assistant Professor Darien Arikoski-Johnson received the top prize at the 2021 Korean International Ceramics Biennale. His work, which won Gold, will be a part of the exhibition on view at the 2021 Gyeonggi World Ceramic Biennale this month. Now in its 11th year, the biennial aims to "to take a review the current status of ceramic arts across the world and issues of ceramic culture to see and discuss where we should go in the future."
Arikoski-Johnson's work is porcelain, hand-built, and decaled. To get the abstracted, sculptural form, he rolls and folds slabs of clay, which provides variability within the process, so that none of the pieces look exactly alike. The rest of the building is an intuitive process that sometimes requires adhering forms onto the base with suspensions. The work is both two and three-dimensional with carved, glazed, and printed surfaces reminiscent of glitch imagery. The artist makes paintings on paper, scans them, alters them in photoshop, and then prints them on decals before firing the imagery to the surface of the form. "My work represents the current entanglement of human cognition and digital processing. By dissecting and altering perceptual fragments, my work raises awareness of a continually altered state of visual consciousness. It makes reference to a shift in contemporary experience relating to cognitive processing and the formation of memory."
Darien Arikoski-Johnson received his BFA from Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota in 2002. He completed a year of post-bachelor work at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri and received an MFA at Arizona State University in 2009. A-Johnson has given workshops at the Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, AZ, the Michigan Mud conference, Allendale, MI, and Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, MI. He was an artist in resident at The Experimental Pottery Workshop, Jingdezhen, China and at Guldagergaard: International Ceramic Research Center, Skælskør, Denmark. A-Johnson’s work has been in national and international exhibitions such as “Ink and Clay 34,” CA, “Concordia Continental,” MN, and “Generously Odd: Craft Now,” KY. He was an NCECA emerging artist at the 2012 conference in Seattle, WA, and has been published in 500 Ceramic Sculptures, Electric Kiln Ceramics, Ceramics Monthly, and Ceramics Art and Perception. Along with multiple private collections, His sculptures are part of public collections including the Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, AZ; California State Polytechnic Collection, Pomona, CA; and The Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, AZ. Darien was recently a studio artist working out of Copenhagen, Denmark.
To see more of Darien's work, visit https://www.darienjohnson.com/