Loren Johnson

ARTIST

Choreographies of Undoing

Research Summary

A personal and relational inquiry into embodiment, visibility, and the social construction of masculinity as being deconstructed through a cis male body. While the current phase focuses on my own movement and experience, future iterations may include other participants. The primary modes of research include poetry, prose, audio recordings, reflections on recorded movement, and potentially documentary-style interviews. The culmination of the research will take the form of an interactive multimedia presentation, available online and introduced through a live event featuring an artist talk and Q&A.

Background

It began as a personal practice of self-filmed movement in the forest, often in solitude and often nude. What has emerged is an inquiry into embodiment, visibility, and, perhaps most of all, a quiet refusal of the roles I’ve learned to inhabit as a cis man—a refusal born of a wish to inhabit my body fully, not as a tool or resource, but simply as a soft animal.

These movements are a soft refusal to move alone.
The forest, the camera, your watching — all are part of this undoing.
This is not self-exposure for its own sake, but a way of remembering that our bodies remember together.
May this small undoing help loosen yours too.

Is this visible? Is this coming through? (hearing static and high-pitched sounds of tuning a radio dial.)

I grew up off-grid in the Cascade Mountains, and as an adult, entering the forest always brings both a sense of refuge and of being returned to a younger place. In this way, I often feel more available for careful listening—to both my internal experience and the experience of my body in these less built worlds.

Nostrils flare, vision sharpens, and this feeling of attentiveness is both familiar and pleasurable—like coming home.

Introducing a camera into this space as my witness has been recent—and for me, vulnerable and curious.

I feel that what is happening in me in this project is a necessary gesture in a long journey of re-patterning and undoing. If the shapes and gestures of my body have been formed under the gaze of social projections onto a visibly cis man, then perhaps something in their undoing also wishes to be witnessed—not for exposure or spectacle, nor as protest, but as a quiet offering to any of us asking questions with our bodies and seeking a way back to our animal sense.

This work is ongoing—tentative, embodied, and unfinished. For now, I’m still exploring, watching, listening, and filming. 

Questions guiding this inquiry