The Way Things Can Happen

Essex Flowers is pleased to present Erin Johnson’s solo exhibition The Way Things Can Happen which revisits The Day After (1983), the landmark made-for-television film depicting a nuclear attack on Kansas. Produced at the height of the Cold War, The Day After was filmed on location in Lawrence, Kansas, with a cast of more than 5,000 local residents. Blurring the distinction between everyday life and cinematic fiction, the film achieved the urgency and scale of live coverage of a national catastrophe, becoming one of the most-watched and politically consequential television broadcasts in American history and energizing anti-nuclear activism in the United States. In Johnson’s multi-channel video installation, former extras from The Day After recall scenes in which they performed more than four decades ago. They recount their memories without reference to the movie itself, describing instead experiences of panic, evacuation, injury, loss, and survival. As the distinction between performance and lived experience begins to dissolve, the work creates a space where fictional catastrophe and personal memory become inseparable. The Way Things Can Happen asks what it means for a city to perform its own destruction. Through the embodied memories of Lawrence residents, Johnson examines how imagined futures are woven into lived experience and how cultural anxieties persist across generations. The work unfolds across multiple temporalities at once: the Cold War, the decades that followed, the escalation of nuclear fears in the present, and the act of recollection itself. Erin Johnson is an artist and filmmaker based in New York, NY. She received an MFA and a Certificate in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and has participated in residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), among others. Her work has been exhibited or screened at venues including e-flux (New York, NY), BOAN1942 Artspace (Seoul, KR), BOFFO (Fire Island, NY), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, FR / Berlin, DE), Bienalsur (Buenos Aires, AR), MOCA (Toronto, CA), Munchmuseet (Oslo, NO), Sanatorium (Istanbul, TR), Times Square Arts (New York, NY), etc. galerie (Prague, CZ), Cinalfama (Lisbon, PT), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), Billytown (The Hague, NL), Galleria Eugenia Delfini (Rome, IT), and Redcat (Los Angeles, CA). Johnson is the Undergraduate Director and faculty member of the Studio Art Program at New York University. The Way Things Can Happen is curated by Sara Stern.