Artist – Ezra Johnson
Stranded in a House, 2013
Freight + Volume
530 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
T: (1) 212 691 7700
E: nick@freightandvolume.com
W: www.freightandvolume.com
Stranded in a House, 2013, presents a simple narrative of a male figure moving through a series of rooms. Johnson uses the pages of furniture catalogs to represent domestic interiors. On these pages, he paints the figure moving through each room and onto the next. The man-figure is loosely rendered in wet paint which helps spread an idea of continuous motion. Sometimes the he is replicated with each forward step until occupying the whole room, while at other times he leaves behind an unctuous cloud of wiped-away paint. The figure’s cyclical motion and fluid physical shape create an increasing sense of existential anxiety that is thematically underscored by the film’s title borrowed from a line in Bob Dylan’s 1967 song, The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest—a song that in its closing phrases also includes the line; “one should never be where one does not belong.”