Leasho Johnson on Clubhouse

Bio

Leasho Johnson (b.1984) is a visual artist working primarily in painting, collage, sculpture, and some digital medium. He was born in Montego-Bay but raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril Jamaica. Johnson uses his experience growing up black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition. Johnson is inspired by Jamaican Dancehall street culture, psychological interiorities, gender politics, and black mythologies. He uses abstraction to blur the distinction of stereotype and representation, geography and memory, to reveal or hide western contentions with the black body.

Working in a multiplicity of mediums, His characters are formed around narratives of gender and identity. They also utilize both traditional and contemporary interpretations of ancestral and personal stories. His interest sometimes comes from reinterpreting/interrupting the historical imagery of the Empire with contemporary realities. His work essentially explores contestation and tensions within western culture around sexuality and seeks to explore present meanings in context to historical truths.