Know Thy Neighbour #3 artist focus: Jessee Lee Johns of The Subiaco Object Exchange
Alongside the Know Thy Neighbour #3 exhibition, showing at Cullity Gallery, Spaced is producing an on-site public program just a short drive away in Subiaco with artist Jessee Lee Johns.
Jessee was born in 1980 in Western Australia, where he lives and works.
After completing a Bachelors degree at Curtin in 2000, he had a rather lengthy sabbatical from the practice of art, to the point where he’s pretty certain those credentials have long since expired.
His practice is rooted in a DIY philosophy of lowered standards and tactical ignorance that has generated a list of impressive sounding achievements.
Jessee has exhibited extensively outside the gallery system both nationally and internationally.
He is the sole citizen of The Commonwealth Of New Bayswater, a country he founded in 2017 that appears sporadically. He is its sometime ambassador, but certainly not it’s head of state. It currently has a semi functional postal service where Australians can thoughtfully send postcards to loved ones in order to subtly brag about the fact that they are overseas.
He invented a dish called ‘meat porridge’, which is just an argument about context and taste rather than an actual thing humans would want to eat.
He is the co-founder and director of the Contemporary Institute Of Modern Art (CIOMA), an international and pan-temporal art institution with sites in 2015, 2016, Cambodia and 2020.
In order to get out of having to stage fairly large scale solo show at PSAS in 2018, Jessee summoned the gallery and himself from 2020, inadvertently preventing Western Australia’s secession and collapse at the hands of Westralia’s future Captain, Ben Cousins. He got out of having to do all that work, and prevented a localised apocalypse, but it made quite a mess which he did have to clean up.
The Subiaco Object Exchange opens from the 24th to 26th of March, situated in front of the Subiaco Museum.
Image courtesy of Jessee Lee Johns.
