Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect | Johansson Projects | Oakland, CA | 2019

Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect began with doubt. The quieter kind that lingers beneath daily life. Questions about how to be a good partner, how to be steady, how to build something lasting. I was soon to be married, and these works came out of the anxiety I felt at that threshold—wanting to provide, to show up, to be enough. The title, borrowed from a Decemberists song, felt like the right container for that mix of worry and hope.

The paintings function like schematics, blueprints for dumb or impossible structures. Arches that don’t connect, shapes that imply support but carry no weight, scaffolds with no purpose. Alongside them, I built chairs out of flimsy plywood. They mirrored the paintings and invited people to sit, but they weren’t stable enough to trust. They were jokes, but also metaphors for my own self-doubt. For the awkwardness of trying to build something meaningful when you’re not sure what you’re doing.

I was thinking about modernist abstraction and architectural language, but also about cartoon logic, Kafka’s Odradek, and the quiet comedy of failure. This show was a way to hold all of that. The nervousness, the affection, the clumsy effort to get it right. I wasn’t aiming for polish or resolution. I was trying to give form to the tension between what we hope to build and what we’re actually able to hold together. The edge between construction and collapse. Between intention and accident. Between being ready and being ready enough.