Bonfire

Jason Johnson

Jason Johnson is a Detroit-born, self-taught multidisciplinary artist working in photography and oil painting. Through bold color, theatrical composition, and layered storytelling, he creates images that examine Black life through a deeply personal, reflective lens. His work reflects a metacognitive approach to storytelling, exploring how identity, perception, and lived experience shape both individual and collective memory. Drawing from his own photographs, Johnson transforms his subjects into surreal oil paintings that merge lived experience with imagination, creating timeless imagery that empowers, endures, and allows people to feel seen.

Johnson has exhibited throughout Michigan, including group exhibitions such as Art Auctions at Detroit Fine Arts Breakfast Club, Shooters Only and Watch This at Push Gallery, Gifted VI at Irwin House, and Taste and Texture at The Markt'd. His solo exhibitions include High Society (Detroit), Culterverse (Ann Arbor), and Friends Closet (Ypsilanti). He is also a member of, and has sold work at Detroit’s Fine Arts Breakfast Club.

Bio

Project Statement

Bonfire is an immersive, multisensory installation created for (Sub)surface, an exhibition
exploring accessible art experiences for audiences of all abilities.

Designed to engage the senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing, the installation recreates the atmosphere of gathering around an outdoor bonfire. Visitors are invited into a modular environment featuring log seating, a glowing campfire, moonlight, a night sky, trees, and grass. This is achieved through tactile materials, ambient sound, evocative scents, and carefully crafted visual elements. Bonfire encourages participants to experience the familiar comfort and connection of an evening around the fire in an accessible and inclusive way. The twist will be that observers with all their senses must choose one of their senses to give up prior to entering. In this way, they can gain a deeper appreciation of each sense.

Rather than simply depicting a bonfire, the installation invites visitors to inhabit the memory and feeling of one, emphasizing sensory engagement, presence, and shared experience.

Visual Description

Bonfire is an immersive, multisensory installation contained within an approximately 8-foot-high, 8-foot-wide, and 12-foot-deep modular room. Visitors enter through an opening in the front wall into an intimate environment with warm orange walls, minimal overhead lighting, and artificial grass covering the floor.

At the center of the room is a simulated bonfire pit made without live fire. A slender,
approximately 7-foot-tall tree grows vertically from the center of the pit, becoming the visual focal point of the installation. The bonfire is surrounded by logs that serve as seating, inviting visitors to gather around the central tree and fire-like glow.

The visual environment is accompanied by a soundscape of crackling bonfire sounds and
scents associated with a bonfire and the outdoors. Minimal overhead lighting keeps the room dim and atmospheric while illuminating the tree, seating, orange walls, and central installation.

Together, the enclosed architecture, artificial grass, tree, simulated bonfire, seating, sound, scent, and subdued lighting create the sensory impression of gathering around a bonfire while remaining inside a constructed exhibition space.