Elizabeth Johnson: Dream Gap

Elizabeth Johnson's first New York solo exhibition: paintings of the gap between dreaming and waking, when a scene is still familiar and yet dissolving. About Collective Z presents Dream Gap, Elizabeth Johnson's first solo exhibition in New York. The show is built around the series of the same name, begun in 2025, and brings its newest canvases together with paintings from 2021 onward, so that the series can be seen growing out of the work before it. Each painting starts from a picture. Johnson photographs pictures of fields, houses, faces, ships, animals and water, warps and distorts them on the computer, and prints them out as source material. On the canvas, the image fragments never settle into one scene: a road lifts into the sky, a shoreline turns into weather, a crowd floats loose from the ground. The seams between them are where the strangeness lives, the sense of floating, falling or flying that belongs to dreams. Johnson scrapes and wipes away image fragments more often than she conserves them, continuing until accidents and subject scraps coalesce into the feeling she is after. Ideas that fail are partly erased rather than painted out, so each surface keeps the record of its own decisions, a practice she calls "losing to gain." Opening reception: Thursday, November 12, 6-8 PM Artist conversation with Elizabeth Keithline: Saturday, November 21, 4-6 PM, talk at 4:30 PM Gallery hours Wednesday to Saturday, 1-6 PM, and by appointment. Read more Toggle Painting