Interoception: Miles Johnston at Last Rites Gallery

If you’re in New York, please do us both a favor and head over to the Last Rites Gallery between now and April 21st to experience Interoception, the debut solo exhibition of oil on linen paintings and graphite on paper drawings by UK-born, Sweden-based artist Miles Johnston.

“Interoception” is the essence of our internal states of thought and feeling, covering a broad range of sensory experiences emanating from places in our bodies that we don’t always fully understand. This lesser-known sense goes beyond the physical and into the deeply emotional, affecting self-perception and ultimately placing emphasis on our metaphysics.

Our minds will struggle with personal and perplexing questions: Why do we feel empty inside? Why do our minds conjure desolate and desperate thoughts on loop as we go to bed? Why does our mind create a self-perception that oftentimes deviates from what our body already provides? All of these subverted questions build a platform for Miles Johnston to set up his compositions and explore the deviations between our internal states of consciousness and the complex, underlying reality of our life situations.

I’ve been captivated by Miles Johnston’s dysmorphic artwork since I first set eyes on it on Instagram back in 2016. His paintings and drawings of humans depicted in their existential complexity as matryoshki, flat wood surfaces wearing human masks, hollow shells containing mazes or waterfalls or overflowing with vegetation all resonate deeply. So many of Johnston’s pieces speak to me as moments in which I’ve felt exactly like what he’s rendered, which makes viewing them a wonderfully cathartic experience.

“Each piece is a statement on how we feel in particularly transformative moments, day to day, on a more intimate level. His drawings and paintings mirror the human tendency to question our nature as more than just flesh and bones, and to suggest that behind all of the superficial murk and confusion, we can all be stuck in temporary crises and work together to break out of the loop.”