Cletus Johnson

Cletus Johnson's shadowbox sculptures and collages of photographs and ephemera operate through simple but effective juxtapositions. Often, a precisely placed figurative image turns a ticket, playbill, envelope, or other paper souvenir into a kind of stage. Some of his best-known works, which were exhibited in several solo shows at the noted Castelli Gallery, represent theaters in miniature. In the late 1980s and early '90s, Johnson collaborated with Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley on a series of collages incorporating fragments of text written by Creeley, and later illustrated his 1991 book Gnomic Verses.