RASHID JOHNSON on looking INWARD, being PRESENT, and seeing through the MOMENT

The idea of "now" has always been central to my project as an artist-and it's central because it's complicated.

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There is often a sense of urgency in the way artists talk about the current moment, but also a constant sense of reflection.

This body of work I've been making, "Soul Paintings," speaks to that idea. It has come out of a transition from a previous body of work I'd started making about 10 years ago called "Anxious Men," which was a group of drawings and paintings that unpacked anxiety-and in some ways served as an attempt to navigate both my own anxiety and the collective anxiety we all experience.

The making of these "Soul Paintings" happens to coincide with a moment when I think that soul-searching is really at the heart of what a lot of us are doing as we think about this political moment, this spiritual moment, and how we imagine or conceive of our essence. Something I often try to do with my work is answer unanswerable questions or participate in the illustration of things we sometimes struggle to illustrate. What does a soul look like? And how do you bring that to life? When we say the word soul, I think we all, in our own ways, understand what we're talking about.

But if I were to ask a bunch of people individually to describe very specifically what a soul is for them, then I'd probably get a range of different answers-in terms of both what one looks like and its philosophical and spiritual components. The soul is an idea that we all collectivize around and simultaneously have a lot of trouble defining, so these works are my way of exploring that.