Emma C. Johnson Writer/Artist/Musician

Artist’s Statement

Neoliberal Loops Project

Emma C. Johnson

Neoliberal Loops explores how neoliberalism, postfeminism, and economic precarity are mediated through visual culture. My work explores mundane and idiosyncratic details that reflect society. I work primarily in painting, printmaking, photography, video, sound, and text. Neoliberal Loops includes music/sound and digital video, photography, text on a moving LED lights screen, and letterpress on paper. Whatever medium the idea demands determines the materiality.

I am influenced by personal experience and academic scholarship. Visual culture scholar Nicolas Mirzoeff proposed Visuality 1 and 2 based on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1 and History 2. This project takes the concept of different ways of understanding rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s concept of revealing and concealing information about an event but expands the concept of countervisuality into the realm of sound. The goal is to mediate the concept of neoliberalism in a way that provides opportunities for new meaning and understanding of neoliberalism. Mirzoeff and film scholar Jill Godmilow critique and proscribe the limitations and affordances of visual culture. I want to take what they have theorized and put it into practice to test and challenge their theories.

The Neoliberal Loops project features three related works on the theme of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. This exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on capitalism, feminism, and representation, and grapple with this material in a visceral way. I invite viewers to reflect on neoliberalism, which often seems as natural as the air we breathe to open up a dialog about how representations of neoliberalism shape our understanding of it and how we might envision other possibilities for living differently.

This exhibition was also an opportunity to receive guidance from Michigan Technological University’s Math and Music Lab (MML) co-directors Robert Schnieder and Michael Maxwell. Combining math, visual and performing arts, and the humanities opens up possibilities. This project brings my writing, art, music, and theoretical background together when these areas are typically compartmentalized. My time at MTU was a unique opportunity to combine disciplines to culminate in an interdisciplinary project.

– Emma C. Johnson, 2026

Artist’s Statement
Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation)
Emma C. Johnson

Emma Johnson, “Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation),” Digital Video, 27min, 28sec, 2026.

Emma Johnson, “Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation),” Digital Photograph Print, 11 x 17 inches, 2026.

Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) is a video and photograph based on Sofia Coppola’s opening film shot in Lost in Translation (2003) which she based on the painter John Kacere’s Jutta (1973). The images created by Kacere and Coppola are medium shots of a woman laying on her side on a bed with sheer underwear, facing away from the viewer. The composition abstracts and commodifies the body by discluding the head and feet. Coppola’s sleeping subject reminded me of the French version of Beauty and the Beast, the 1946 La Belle et la Bête. The film is creepy because a man watches a woman being vulnerable, sleeping and unconscious, and preys on her. It was unsettling to watch before the Me Too Movement and seems even more antiquated now.

I wanted to reference the Kacere/Coppola image but make a version to create commentary through difference. Instead of wearing sheer underwear that renders the woman an object of the camera’s gaze, or as feminist scholar Laura Mulvey would put it, “the male gaze,” the woman in my version wears more conservative clothing. The frame isolates the bottocks from the rest of the body, which commodifies the body, positioning the viewer as the male gaze; however, the opaque clothing choice denies viewers access to seeing the naked female body that the clothing obscures.

This comments on the tension between feminism and postfeminism in society. Subscribers of postfeminism would embrace the idea of a woman, empowered through neoliberalism, to dress in a sexy fashion acquired from conspicuous luxury spending. A figure in sweatpants (or, silk pajama bottoms) does not deny the gaze, but obstructs the sexualization of looking. This mitigates, but does not completely stop, the gaze from hoarding an asymmetry in power. But mitigating is powerful resistance. The woman in my image cannot control that she is being looked at, but she can control what she displays herself in, partially denying the male gaze.

Both Kacere and Coppola meant their images to depict women who do not expect to be looked at. Their figures believe that they are alone. However, I’m sceptical. When humans are alone they choose comfortable clothing over something that would look sexy to someone if that someone were around. Wearing realistic clothing denies the fantasy of the male gaze, e.g., the clothing is opaque and non-revealing. The body whom I depict faces the camera so that she might still be gazed upon but there is also confrontation in that the object is looking at the viewer/subject from off screen.

Artist’s Statement
Neoliberal Truisms
Emma C. Johnson

Neoliberal Truisms is work commenting on the subjects of neoliberalism, postfeminism, and economic precarity. The written structural form of truisms makes the ideas that the words convey sound nice and pithy, like a haiku. The familiarity of the textual form is comforting. However, this aesthetic form is juxtaposed with textual meaning that is slightly off, or even disturbing. The juxtaposition of a short, digestible phrase with a message that sounds familiar but isn’t quite right is meant to defamiliarize the familiar so that the viewer is invited to investigate societal ideas often taken for granted, e.g. patriarchal neoliberalism.

The work is based on the style of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Birgit Brenner. In this way, there is already an audience expectation of what the work will be dictated by art history. The truisms are also reminiscent of George Orwell’s phrases in Animal Farm and 1984. Because of this history, the viewer is primed to expect irony in what they will be reading.

I both wrote truisms and used GenAI to generate truisms. I invite the audience to contemplate the normalization of neoliberal values, including postfeminism and economic precarity, in Western culture. I chose to both write and generate text because I wanted the flexibility to write what I wanted to write, but I also wanted to use the generic algorithms of genAI to see what it would generate as another layer of commentary on neoliberalism and the control over the narratives surrounding neoliberalism.

The truisms in Neoliberal Truisms take two material forms. The LED is a direct reference to Holzer and Brenner’s work. The connotations of the LED add a layer of significance and credibility in that it is an expensive medium that takes time to program. Therefore, whatever is displayed carries a heavier significance by these barriers to its creation. The other material form is letterpress. I liked the juxtaposition of computer-generated impersonal AI juxtaposed with the human hand needed to print by hand the prints of ink on paper. Like the LED, the letterpress process takes significant time to set up, which elevates the message presented.

– Emma C. Johnson, 2026

Artist’s Statement
Neoliberal Loops
Emma C. Johnson

MIDI soundtrack, Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Sound, 16min, 4sec., 2025-2026.

Video 1 (long durée) - “Stock Market Crashes 1637-2025”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 16min, 4sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/iS2-lWl_4hE

Video 2 (medium durée) - “Perusing Zillow and Billionaires’ Row”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 32min, 8sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/mWAkUEqH_SE

Video 3 (short durée) - “Shopping and Waves by the Statue of Liberty”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 64min, 16sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/x7zFbCuA1DY

Neoliberal Loops is an attempt to materially (video/sound/space) conceptualize neoliberalism employing theories from the academic fields of history, film theory, and visual culture. Neoliberal Loops refers to the loops used in the musical composition, the videos playing on a loop, and the historical loops that we live in. These historical patterns (loops) are described by Braudel’s medium durée and exemplified in stock market crashes and events leading up to them on repeat (loops) every 15 years under neoliberal capitalism.

I collected the NYC stock market data from each day of The 2008 Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2009) from The Wall Street Journal. Composed in MIDI, the NASDAQ numbers correspond to musical notes to create a musical composition, with the pitch changing by one half-tone every 50 stock-market points on a musical scale ranging from C3 (middle C) to G5. Notes get lower as the stock market decreases. The music is in 4/4 time with each bar including the opening, high, low, and closing stock-market numbers, represented in four quarter notes. Rests in the music stand in for weekends and holidays when the stock-market trading floor is closed. The first and last notes of the measure can be different because there is a pre- (4am-9:30am) and post-trading market (4-8pm) outside of regular business hours, 9:30am-4pm EST. The musical piece is the duration of a work day on Wall Street. The musical notes were derived from data charting the rise and fall of the stock market over three different durations.

French historian Fernand Braudel coined the long durée, medium durée, and the short durée or sea foam in his work The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). Braudel founded the Annales School of history which focused on social structures instead of isolated events. In applying his concepts to the 2007 Wall Street Crash, I am invoking the idea that the crash was not an event but rather a societal structure in place that culminated in disaster rather than an unfortunate unforeseen anomaly. The three video projections correspond with the sound and each represent a duration (or durée) of time. Braudel’s three durées include:

Courte durée: short term, e.g., political shifts, bad harvests

Moyenne durée: medium term, e.g., trade cycles over decades to a century

Longue durée: long term, e.g., geographical and social changes that shift over centuries to millennia

Each durée is conceptually paired with Nicolas Mirzoeff’s concept of Visuality 1, Visuality 2, and countervisuality, which Mirzoeff writes about in The Right to Look: A counterhistory of visuality (2011). Visuality 1 is visuality that supports the hegemonic state, Visuality 2 can be neutral, or Visuality 2 can include countervisuality which critiques the hegemonic state. The three videos comprising the Neoliberal Loops video installation include:

Long durée/ Visuality 2-countervisuality: footage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests among many protests throughout history

Medium durée/ Visuality 2-neutral: video of a domestic space/home with someone looking at Zillow.com

Short durée/ Visuality 1-cultural hegemony: stock market numbers changing in real time

All of the imagery in the three videos lead to and/or fade into the sea.

The music incorporates three layers that each draw on stock market data over a short, medium, and long durée.

Video 1: The collection of crashes in one place and placed together in succession illustrates that each crash is not an anomaly but instead part of a pattern that spans centuries, from the tulip speculation bubble in 1637 to the U.S. tariffs that caused a crash in 2025. By showing one crash after another, the viewer experiences the temporality differently. In real life lived in real time, people forget the last crash faded from public collective memory; but, it’s unforgettable and patterns are recognizable when shown one after the other in the medium of a video collection of images.

Video 2: Wavelength (1967), directed by Michael Snow, was an inspiration for the visual aspect of this part of the video installation. Wavelength’s slow zoom into the photograph of water as well as Braudel’s sea foam in the short durée led to my choice to use water as imagery. Additionally, water has a cyclical relationship with time to create the motion of waves. I also appreciate the domestic setting of Snow’s film of the interior of an NYC apartment. Snow’s film is 45 minutes, but composed of 18 three-minute segments, because of the restriction that 16mm film could only be shot for 3 minutes maximum. At each three-minute mark in my video zooming in on the water at the feet on the Statue of Liberty, I have superimposed an image of a commercial product often purchased during recessions, or as indicators that a recession is coming. These products don’t seem like much individually and appear neutral. But together they tell a story of financial precarity.

Video 3: Zillow.com is interesting imagery because it is both domestic and private away from Jürgen Habbermas’s public sphere, but it is also directly linked to the housing bubble because the domestic simultaneously is also part of the real estate market. Additionally, many people like to peruse Zillow recreationally. That is, they have no intention of buying anything but use the platform for purposes of fantasy, such as imagining financial security. This phenomenon was even satirized by Saturday Night Live in 2021: https://youtu.be/yEfsaXDX0UQ?si=SILLp-3TTX39fRmY “The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other peoples’ houses,” one of the sketch’s characters explains. This links the private with the public in the form of houses as domestic space, global financial investment, as well as part of occupying an imaginary space of eroticized rags to riches from house flipping fantasy.

The soundtrack: The music is meant to be beautiful but, because it is based on the ugliness of financial precarity and a system that crashes approximately every fifteen years, there is a tension between aesthetic beauty and an ugly lived reality. I invite the audience to contemplate the normalization of financial crisis and the structures that uphold models that lead to financial insecurity/precarity.

– Emma C. Johnson, 2026