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Natasha Johns-Messenger (born 1970)[1] is an Australian conceptual artist and filmmaker, who has lived and worked in New York and Melbourne.[2] Johns-Messenger is best known for her large-scale site-determined installations that examine spatial perception and light.[3] Her work is a process of imitation, illusion and trickery, often activated by architectural interventions and optical physics.[4]
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Johns-Messenger's practice includes photography, digital painting and sculpture.
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Johns-Messenger is the great-granddaughter of Australian rugby legend Dally Messenger and sister of singer Julia Messenger.[5] Johns-Messenger's mother, Catherine Marie Johns, is a poet and novelist.[6] Her father, Dally Messenger III, is an author, noted for his general contribution to the Australian civil celebrant movement.[7]
Johns-Messenger employs the principles of architecture, film and the visual arts to produce a new experiential sculptural framework. She creates representations or abstractions from the original architecture, using material devices such as, periscopic mirrors, live video projections and architectural mimicry to produce large-scale installations.[8] Her interest in quantum physics,[3] mathematics, seriality and geometry is also implemented within her practice.[9] Johns-Messenger critically examines the role of the body in space. Her primary concern with altering ordinary "ways of seeing" began during early childhood, where she spent days sketching, conceptualising and photographing shapes from ordinary objects.[9]
Johns-Messenger commenced her art practice as a painter. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours in 1994,[10] and in 2000 she completed a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). She has exhibited at major institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney,[11] the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and the Contemporary Centre for Photography in Melbourne.[12]
In 2012 Johns-Messenger completed an MFA in Film at Columbia University, New York, marking a shift into narrative film, where she combines her interest with abstraction and the moving image into real time.[13] Blackwood, her final graduate film at Columbia, won numerous awards at the 2012 Columbia University Film Festival, including the Alumni Award for Best Film, National Board of Review Motion Pictures Award and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Best Director Award.[14] Blackwood went on to premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival and was featured in 40 film festivals and won numerous awards. Her first film after graduation, Off-Ramp, won Best Student Film and Best Actress at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival.[15]
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Johns-Messenger has been curated into international group exhibitions alongside artists Dan Graham, James Turrell and Lawrence Weiner.[16] In 2009/10 Johns-Messenger was commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund, for her work ThisSideIn and in 2010 created Recollection for No Longer Empty, New York at Governor’s Island.[17] In 2007, she won the Den Haag Sculptuur Rabo Bank Prize[18] presented to her by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and in 2005 Johns-Messenger won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture with her then collaborative group OSW, Open Spatial Workshop (Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell and Terri Bird), for their sculpture groundings.[19]
Other exhibitions include Yellow, 2011, at ACCA, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Through to You, "Freedom-American Sculpture" The Hague (Den Haag), The Netherlands; Of Water, 2008, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane; ISCP Open Studio Exhibition, ISCP, New York and Trappenhuis (Stairwell) Installation, Den Haag Sculptuur, Escher Museum, Netherlands.[18]
The 2020 Adelaide//International exhibition at the Samstag Museum in Adelaide centred around an installation called Somewhere Other by John Wardle Architects in collaboration with Johns-Messenger. It had also been Australia's entry in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.[20] Due to run from 28 February to 12 June,[21] the exhibition was cut short by the closure of the Samstag in March 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.[22]
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