Thursday, September 3, 2026
Artist's Statement: Neoliberal Loops [soundtrack]
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.
There are three loops in the soundtrack Neoliberal Loops.
Loop #1: The whole duration of the 2008 Recession (2007-2009)
Loop #2: The U.S. government interventions with money, including bailing out AIG and two subsequent financial packages (9/16/08, 10/03/08, and 02/17/2009) Starting on each “event” day, another note is added to create a harmony on 9/16/08, a triad on 10/03/08, and a 7th on 2/17/09. The extra notes represent the money affecting the stock market so the harmonies continue for the rest of the musical composition.
Loop #3: The Occupy Wall Street encampment in NYC as a 59-day intervention (09/17/11-11/15/11) Musical discordance is overlaid over corresponding dates in 2008 to coincide with the occupation in 2011.
Neoliberal Loops Soundtrack (Remixed)
Neoliberal Loops REMIX TRACK pt1_Music 1637_1704-2008 [WINTER DREAMS]
43 min., 4 sec.
Neoliberal Loops REMIX TRACK pt2_Music 2009-2023_2026 [DIAMONDS AND CHERRY BLOSSOMS]
31 min., 8 sec.
9 to 5 Work B**ch
5 min., 22 sec.
Neoliberal Loops (Opening bell numbers for each day of the recession at 510bpm)
46 sec.
I remixed the Neoliberal Loops soundtrack with samples of music from classical music to pop music, including hip hop, in chronological order.
I was influenced by the American DJ Girl Talk who mixes pop and hip hop. His songs make me feel nostalgic. I wanted to create an experience of nostalgia and moving through time while linking the stock market to the soundtrack of everyday life.
I was also influenced by the Turkish producer and electronic music artist Venëris. Indeed, I included his “Vivaldi Winter Drill #2” in the “Neoliberal Loops” remix. He takes classical music and adds hip-hop bass to create pieces that stay true to the classical music but add contemporary elements. I see this as a way of viewing history in the present. We take what we know of the past but put a modern spin on it. Historians call it presentism, with a negative connotation implying that you are not being true to the times. An inaccuracy due to our inability to embody the minds of people of the past with different concerns and sensibilities. However, I think it’s unavoidable and it’s the way we understand the world around us. Additionally, classical music can feel really old and Venëris’s contemporary hip-hop elements make the old pieces feel fresh and modern. Instead of a beautiful antiquated piece of art that you admire and try to imagine the zeitgeist of the times, new life if breathed into the piece and you don’t have to imagine it. You can (literally) feel it.
The soundtrack starts with 1704’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach because it’s the earliest music I could find close to 1637 when the tulip bubble began. I wanted to connect these worlds running in parallel: life and commerce.
I divided this timeline into two parts: before and after 2008 to delineate between before and after the crash.
Additionally, by juxtaposing similar phenomena, e.g. the pursuit of money, in a short succession, I emphasize Western culture’s preoccupation with wealth.
Additional “Neoliberal Loops” remixes include the themes of rain, weather, work, money, and luxury goods. E.g. Blending Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” with Britney Spears’s “Work B**ch” sparks a dialogue between feminism and postfeminism in relation to work and capitalism.
– Emma C. Johnson, 2026
Works referenced
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1972–76.
Godmilow, Jill. Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Snow, Michael, dir. Wavelength. 1967; New York: The Film-makers' Cooperative, 1967. 16mm film.
The Wall Street Journal.
Artist's Statement: Neoliberal Loops [Videos]
MIDI soundtrack, DJEJ, a.k.a. DJ Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Sound, 16min, 4sec., 2025-2026.
https://youtu.be/sFsX02Q-5bM
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/AKi7xP3mr8E
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/MKSFirJKqLo
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/huizJBq28V8
I was influenced by Seth Price’s 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7 (2007) and I was influenced by Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud.
Neoliberal Loops is an attempt to materially (video/sound/space) conceptualize neoliberalism employing theories from 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. They are 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 and I set up parameters to translate the data into a musical composition. 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: The entire crash, the bailout of AIG, the first and second U.S. bank government bailouts, and the duration of OWS’s occupation of Zuccotti Park in NYC
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). After WWII, Braudel led the Annales School of history which focused on social structures instead of isolated events. While there, he also formalized structures of economic cycles. In applying Braudel’s concepts to the 2007 Wall Street Crash, I invoke the idea that the crash was not an event but rather a societal structure in place that culminated in disaster rather than an unfortunate, isolated unforeseen anomaly. The three video projections 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
I paired each durée conceptually 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: Recession goods as economic indicators
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
Alternate video: footage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests among many protests throughout history
All of the imagery in the three videos fade into the sea, bringing it back to the concept of the Mediterranean, or bodies of water carrying connotations of permanence and exerting a strong force on history.
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 a condensed temporal space 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 recession in 2025. By showing crashes in succession, the viewer experiences the temporality differently. In real life, lived in real time, people forget the last crash faded from public collective memory. However, it’s unforgettable and patterns are recognizable when shown together.
Video 2: Wavelength (1967), directed by Michael Snow, served as an inspiration for the visual aspect of this part of the video installation. Wavelength’s slow zoom into the photograph of waves in a body of water, as well as Braudel’s sea foam of the short durée, led to my choice to use water as imagery. Additionally, water has a cyclical relationship with time creating the motion of waves. I also appreciate the domestic setting of Snow’s film, 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 superimposed an image of a commercial product often purchased during recessions, products that serve as indicators that a recession is coming. These products don’t seem like much individually and appear neutral. But together in succession they tell a story of financial precarity.
Video 3: Zillow.com is both domestic and private away from Jürgen Habbermas’s public sphere. It is also directly linked to the housing bubble because the domestic simultaneously is 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 fantasies.
Artist's Statment: Neoliberal Truisms [Analog]
Emma Johnson, HAPPINESS IS CAPITALISM in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, THE INVISIBLE HAND LEAVES VISIBLE SCARS in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, AUSTERITY IS DISCIPLINE FOR THE POOR in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, VISIBILITY IS NOT POWER in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson, AMBITION IS QUEEN in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, THE MARKET DOESN’T LOVE YOU BACK in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, CONSUME HOPE / DENY NEED in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, FREEDOM LOOKS LIKE DESIRE in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, TRUTH IS OUTSOURCED in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, DEREGULATION IS WAR in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, THE GAZE ALWAYS DEMANDS PERFORMANCE in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, CHOICE IS A SPECTACLE in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, YOUR HOPE IS COLLATERAL in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
Emma Johnson X GenAI, THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, THE PROFITS ARE MALE in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
M. René Johnson X Emma Johnson, WE ARE LIVING IN A VIRTUAL WORLD, AND I AM A VIRTUAL GIRL in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
M. René Johnson X Emma Johnson, IN CRYPTOCURRENCY WE TRUST in Neoliberal Truisms, 2025-2026. Ink on paper (Letterpress). 3.5 x 5 in.
99 Neoliberal Truisms
- Happiness is capitalism
- Drones are more cost effective than diplomacy
- Death is efficient
- Ambition is expected
- Burning the candle at both ends gets the job done quicker
- Hustle is the new obedience
- The girlboss serves the boss
- Debt is the new citizenship
- If everything is for sale, your body is too
- Postfeminism is icing on the cake
- Choice is a spectacle.
- Austerity is discipline for the poor
- Your body is an economic unit
- Care is not profitable
- You are what you can afford
- Individual responsibility is collective denial
- Desperation drives innovation
- You call it opportunity, they call it extraction
- You mistake debt for possibility
- You cannot strike if you never stop working
- Your debt is their power
- Deregulation is war
- The market doesn’t love you back
- Debt is a training regime
- Everyone is a brand until proven otherwise
- Empathy doesn’t scale
- Success means you played the game right
- Privatize gain, socialize loss
- The market is holy, your body is profane
- Dreams can trap you in reality
- The market loves your silence
- Compete or disappear
- Eat. Pray. Spend.
- Desire is repackaged as independence
- Work defines your identity
- The male gaze never retires
- Decadence is everything
- Luck is existential
- Your desires have been outsourced
- Choice is a privilege disguised as freedom
- The future has been sold in advance
- Consume hope / deny need
- Competition demands your obedience
- You are only as valuable as your productivity
- The invisible hand leaves visible scars
- Your insecurity is their strategy
- Freedom to consume is not freedom to live
- Love capital / fear welfare
- You are the brand and the commodity
- Winners write the contracts
- Truth is outsourced
- Your data is worth more than your vote
- Profits hide inside your image
- Deregulation is violence in slow motion
- Buy power / sell rights
- You are the advertisement and the product
- The free market is never free
- Your body is a marketplace
- Markets devour democracy
- Your suffering boosts quarterly growth
- Your hope is collateral
- Your freedom looks good in heels
- Freedom looks like desire
- Desire funds the economy
- Patience is a virtue valued by those who exploit
- You shop, they rule
- Globalization means borders for people, not capital
- Your desire has been outsourced
- Ambition is queen
- Liberation isn’t sold in pink
- Your freedom is for sale
- Debt can be a blessing in disguise
- The public good is bad for business
- Freedom comes with a price tag
- Opportunity knocks twice if you’re rich enough
- Own nothing / be everything
- Repression sometimes pays off
- The gaze always demands performance
- To be seen is not to be free
- The camera never blinks
- Objectification is rebranded as choice
- Decadence dictates morality
- Liberation is individualized, privatized, monetized
- Choice is a cage with polished bars
- Invest like there’s no tomorrow
- Crying over spilled oil is perfectly appropriate
- The future is female, the profits are male
- Optimism is a weapon against you
- My milkshake does more than bring boys to the yard
- What you sell is what watches you
- Deregulation is war
- This point in time is measurable in dollars
- Genocide is the cost of doing business
- Ambition has no ceiling
- Solidarity doesn’t scale
- Visibility is not power
- Your future is collateral
- We are living in a virtual world, and I am a virtual girl (NT by M. René Johnson)
- In cryptocurrency we trust
NT by Emma Johnson: 1-5, 10, 30, 33, 35, 37-38, 65, 69, 72, 77, 82, 85-86, 89, 92-94
NT by EJ X GenAI: 6-9, 11-29, 31-32, 34, 36, 39-64, 65-68, 70-71, 73-74, 76, 78-81, 83-84, 87-88, 90-91, 95-97
NT by M. René Johnson: 98-99
Artist's Statement: Neoliberal Truisms [Digital]
Emma Johnson, Neoliberal Truisms #1 [Digitized Cherry Blossoms], 2025-2026. LED sign. 39 x 8 in.
Emma Johnson, Neoliberal Truisms #2 [99 Neoliberal Truisms], 2025-2026. LED sign. 39 x 8 in.
Emma Johnson, Neoliberal Truisms #3 [Date of stock market crashes, 1637-2025], 2025-2026. LED sign. 39 x 8 in.
I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to
determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become.
– Barbara Kruger
I invite the audience to contemplate the normalization of neoliberal values, including postfeminism and economic precarity, in Western culture.
The written structural form of truisms makes the ideas that the words convey sound pithy, like a haiku. The familiarity of the textual form is comforting. However, this agreeable aesthetic form is juxtaposed with textual meaning that is slightly off, or even disturbing, creating a tension. The juxtaposition of a short, digestible phrase with a message that sounds familiar but isn’t quite right serves to defamiliarize the familiar. This invites the viewer to investigate societal ideas often taken for granted, e.g. patriarchal neoliberalism.
The work is informed by the style of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Birgit Brenner. In this way, there is already a set audience expectation of the work 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 while reading.
I wrote truisms, asked a poet to write truisms, and prompted GenAI to generate truisms. I chose to both write and generate text because I wanted to express my viewpoint, but I also wanted to use the generic algorithms of GenAI to see what a LLM would generate. GenAI adds another layer of commentary on neoliberalism and the structural control over the narratives surrounding neoliberalism that appear neutral or invisible but are embedded with unintentional cultural values.
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 because it is an expensive medium. Therefore, whatever is displayed carries a heavier significance by its overcoming the barriers to its creation. That is, inherent in its aesthetic design is the capital needed for the object’s creation.
In addition to the 99 neoliberal truisms, the LED sign of cherry blossoms relates with Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation), Cherry Blossoms, and The Cherry Blossom Cycle. Likewise, the LED sign of stock market crash dates relates with the Neoliberal Loops installation video 1, visualizing those dates through image (in this case aestheticized text).
The other material form is letterpress. The juxtaposition of impersonal, computer-generated AI juxtaposed with the human hand needed to print ink on paper creates a dialog between the technological and human analog (though, the letterpress machine is also a technology). Like the LED, the letterpress process takes significant time to set up, which elevates the message presented.
While the world is becoming more visually oriented, text is still significant in mediating how individuals interpret themselves in relation to neoliberalism.
– Emma C. Johnson, 2026
Works referenced
Brenner, Birgit. “Birgit Brenner, Stay Rich, 2021.” Artsy via Galerie EIGEN + ART. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/birgit-brenner-stay-rich
Holzer, Jenny. “Jenny Holzer, Selected Works.” Krakow Witkin Gallery. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.krakowwitkingallery.com/artist/jenny_holzer/
Holzer, Jenny. “Jenny Holzer, Selections from Truisms, 1984.” Krakow Witkin Gallery. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.krakowwitkingallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Holzer-SelectionFromTruisms-32051.pdf
Holzer, Jenny. “Truisms, 1978-87.” Museum of Modern Art. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
Truisms. X Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. Accessed March 14, 2026. https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/_files/truisms.pdf
Kruger, Barbara. “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” Museum of Modern Art. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5394
Kruger, Barbara. “Interview: Resisting Reductivism and Breaking the Bubble.” Art 21. https://art21.org/read/barbara-kruger-resisting-reductivism-breaking-the-bubble/
Kruger, Barbara. “Collection: Barbara Kruger.” Whitney Museum of American Art. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://whitney.org/collection/works/12926
Artist's Statement: The Cherry Blossom Cycle
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [DAY/NIGHT] (Short Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [THE FOUR SEASONS] (Medium Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 27 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [INFINITY CYCLE] (Long Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-S], 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 14 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [ALLEGRO] (Short Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [MODERATO] (Medium Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 1 min, 52 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [LARGO] (Long Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 7 min, 4 sec.
The Cherry Blossom Cycle is a series of stop animations made with digital video using LEGOs and watercolor to create the images. The cycles refer to Braudel’s short, medium, and long durées of history.
There are three videos for the three cycles that reference Breudel's durées of history. One tree goes through the cycle of day to night, a short durée. Another tree goes through the cycle of the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, the medium durée. And the third tree goes through a cycle that is unintelligible to the viewer that it is even a cycle. I call it the infinity cycle. It's Breudel's longest durée, which can span centuries or millennia. This idea of a long duration as a part of what are seen as events was also explored by historian Charles Tilly, whose bookThe Contentious French: Four centuries of popular struggle (1986), explores how phenomena seen as non-events are consequential parts that lead to what is viewed as an event. Three additional videos explore the same event and time sequence but experience time differently, in three tempos. While the films are silent, the Italian words reference the same sheet music experienced at different speeds depending on the composer’s directions. Another video skips ahead and presents information in quick bursts. Often life and history is understood this way: in fragments.
For the cherry blossom animations, every time the camera clicks, it freezes a moment in time. But the viewer knows that it is our eye that makes these little events into a cohesive narrative by the perpetual motion that our eyes assemble to make sense of what we see. The famous 1878 “The Horse in Motion” photography experiment by Eadweard Muybridge showed that the world works not always as it appears to us. That is, the horses hooves moved inward in the air rather than out as previously assumed.
Additionally, besides the outward event of a cherry blossom falling, the viewer knows that the tree is going through internal changes that we cannot see; and its environment, including the seasons, contributes to its being and changing.
While there are economic cycles, there are also cycles of the seasons. As Breudel relates trading cycles to the climate of the Mediterranean, I relate the The trees gain and lose their cherry blossoms as the seasons change. While technically everything is nature, people often think of the economy abstracted by the stock market numbers and a walk in the woods as separate, even though their names come from the same Greek root word eco (oikos), which means house (an environment of sorts), household, or home. This phenomena of nature (physis) and technology (techne) being inextricably linked French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy terms “ecotechnics.”
This way of viewing the world relates to the idea of home and the housing bubble that led to the 2008 Recession. Additionally, Canadian philosopher John Russon writes about the home being a boundary between safety and an unpredictable exterior outside world. However, the housing crisis made the boundaries collapse where what was supposed to be a warm and safe space was actually an asset influenced by exterior forces that created instability in what was thought to be stable.
Finally, the LEGO trees juxtapose “real” nature versus the artificiality in the plastic that represents something organic. The bright colors of the LEGOs make nature hyperreal. I both shot the frames using a Leica and used a shallow depth of field to give the films a dream-like quality. I used watercolor for the backgrounds to include a human touch and to add whimsy to the images. The human touch invites the viewer to contemplate the human role in creating historical narratives that guide our actions in the present.
Works referenced
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Coppola, Sofia, dir. 2003. Lost in Translation. United States: Focus Features.
“Eco-.” Merriam Webster. Accessed August 13, 2026. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eco-
Muybridge, Eadweard. The Horse in Motion. 1878. Collotype, dimensions vary. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
For the idea of home, see: Russon, John. “Home.” In Sites of Exposure: Art, politics, and the nature of experience. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017, p. 35-60.
For the idea that nature and technology are inseparable, see: Nancy, Jean-Luc. “From Ontology to Technology.” In The Fragile Skin of the World. New York: Polity, 2019/2021.
Tilly, Charles. 1986. The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Artist's Statement: Cherry Blossoms
Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [window], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [Houghton, Michigan, USA], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [Jena, Germany], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
The cherry blossoms (sakura) are a reference to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, where the protagonist Charlotte decorates her hotel room in Tokyo with paper cherry blossom decorations. In Japanese culture, cherry blossoms represent ephemeralness. This relates to both the ephemeralness of the economy and its cyclical nature, precarity reimagined as a beautiful shifting state. The transient spring beginnings of the cherry blossoms also coincide with the fiscal year in Japan. In this way, nature and economy are linked through aesthetics. This ephemeral, cyclical nature of the cherry blossom directly relates with neoliberal loops, because they share these ethereal and reoccurring properties.
Yet, the cherry blossoms’ reminder that life is fleeting also works in opposition with the way neoliberalism is mythologized in American society. Neoliberalism hides death (the necrocene) under a culture of able-bodied healthiness that denies the existence of death, the ultimate end of the cycle. Or, viewed in another way, the cycle’s beginning.
– Emma C. Johnson, 2026
Works referenced
Jill H. Casid, “Necrolandscaping,” Natura: environmental aesthetics after landscape, ed. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, Dayron Carillo Morell (2018): 237-64.
Coppola, Sofia, dir. 2003. Lost in Translation. United States: Focus Features.
Takeda, Erina. “Significance of Sakura: Cherry Blossom Traditions in Japan,” Smithsonian Institution, April 8, 2014, https://festival.si.edu/blog/2014/significance-of-sakura-cherry-blossom-traditions-in-japan
Artist's Statement: Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation)
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation), 2026. Digital Video, 27min, 28sec.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [opaquely-clothed torso], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [blurry], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Sleeping Jutta (Lost in Translation) [with hand], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
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 reminds 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 in a vulnerable state, sleeping and unconscious, and preys on her. Unsettling to watch before the Me Too Movement, it seems more antiquated now.
I reference the Kacere/Coppola image to create commentary through difference with my version. 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 conservative clothing. The frame isolates the torso from the rest of the body, commodifying the body, positioning the viewer to embody the male gaze. However, the opaque clothing denies viewers access to seeing the naked female body.
Neoliberalism and postfeminism are inextricably linked, as postfeminism co-opted feminism to support a neoliberal agenda. The torso imagery comments on the tension between feminism and postfeminism. Subscribers of postfeminism would embrace the idea of a woman, empowered through advantages gained through patriarchial neoliberalism, to dress in a sexy fashion acquired through conspicuous luxury spending. A figure in sweatpants (or, silk pajama bottoms in the image) 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 still 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 (though not wholly) denying the male gaze.
Both Kacere and Coppola meant their images to depict women who do not expect to be looked at. According to Kacere and Coppola, their figures believe that they are alone. However, I’m skeptical. When humans are alone they choose comfortable clothing over something that would look sexy were that potential gazer 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. Even though the face is offscreen, the orientation of the body positions it in a more confrontational rather than passive relationship with the viewer.
Works referenced
Coppola, Sofia. Lost in Translation. Focus Features, 2003.
Kacere, John. Jutta. 1973, https://www.meiselgallery.com/artwork/jutta/
La Belle et la Bête. Directed by Jean Cocteau. New York: Janus Films: Criterion Collection, 1946/2006.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no.3 (1975): 6-18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6