Rindon Johnson Maps the Pacific Ocean

Spread out across three floors, American artist Rindon Johnson’s exhibition is a reflection on time and space. Best Synthetic Answer, which features a series of newly commissioned works, centres around a project to cross the Pacific Ocean from his hometown, San Francisco, to Shanghai. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the earth’s surface. To carry out this enterprise (which riffs on colonial-era seafaring), one would need a 12-metre boat, three experienced crew members and one-and-a-half months of time to spare – provided you travel at full speed all the way. At least this is what the artist was told by a sailing expert when they discussed his project. Their recorded conversation provides the introduction to this exhibition, which, in turn, serves as a launchpad for an attempt to wade through the Pacific’s fraught history.

 

Stretching across the top floor of the multi-storey museum is Language is a virus or Between Immerwahr and me… (all but one work 2024), a rectangular oceanic map made of Tiffany stained glass that turns what is in fact a mezzanine into a full floor. Coloured in aquatic hues and patterns that echo watery ripples, the map is patchy, like sections of a Google Earth map that have been photographed at different times then joined into a whole. Viewed from above, it hovers at the centre of the floor like a prop in a military command room, inviting one to survey the expanse of the ocean and ponder the challenge and ambition of traversing it.