Paintings and sculptures based on furniture-grade leather expand on Rindon Johnson’s notion of the “byproduct” as an existential category throughout global commerce, history, politics, and philosophy. Despite often being positioned as a luxury good, furniture leather is actually a byproduct of the meat industry, a remainder rather than the explicit goal. With consideration towards the broader trajectory of capitalism throughout history, Johnson proposes that American Blackness itself is a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade. The series poses a number of questions—what overlapping systems have conspired to allow us to come into being? To come into thinking? How do we reckon with and reconceptualize our place in a broader ecology of exploitations and freedoms?

Johnson treats each leather gradually, allowing the character of the specific object to show through with its unique character and individualized history as an animal. Aged and generally allowed to take on character through various time-based processes, the leathers are further treated with pigments whose unique material histories are also of interest to Johnson: Pigment-production further complicates the narrative, with each specific pigment tied to geographic and ecological histories entangled with capitalism.