Talia Johns
WHAT REMAINS
What Remains explores the emotional landscapes inside my mind: a fragmented interior shaped by conflict, memory, and the quiet act of endurance. The work spans surface-designed fiber sculptures, linear wire forms, shadow-cut panels, and color collages. Each piece is a response to an evolving conceptual framework grounded in war, truth, disruption, resilience, and living hope.
This exhibit asks a question - what endures in its absence. What remains when all else has collapsed, when structures fail, when certainty dissolves, when only traces are left behind? In this work, hope and resilience are not only ideals, they are what remain after everything else breaks.
The wire sculptures embody this tension most directly. Made from lightweight black plastic straws and wire, they appear as floating, skeletal forms, lines drawn in air. But it’s not the form alone that speaks.
More than the structures themselves, it is their shadows that complete the artwork. Projected by light, the shadows fall across surfaces and reveal new, ephemeral, ambiguous, emotionally precise patterns. In other works, I transform shadows into different materials. What remains becomes both obstruction and lens, something that casts a shadow while also allowing glimpses through to layered meanings beneath.
What Remains is not a resolution, but a commitment to remain present in complexity. To honor absence without letting it consume. To let disruption speak, while allowing softness to persist. To build truth in fragments. And to let even fragile forms still hold space for breath, memory, and light.
