Leasho Johnson: Reclaiming Freedom and Fluidity in 'Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning' at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago
Leasho Johnson’s debut solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim, Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning, is nothing short of a visual reverie—a bold, complex, and exhilarating exploration of Black queer identity, folklore, and the destabilizing power of abstraction. In this mesmerizing body of work, Johnson creates a world where form and meaning blur, where the act of releasing oneself from fixed definitions becomes both a personal and political act. The exhibition, which brings together nine stunning new works, invites us into a world of wild beauty, where figures emerge like myths from the sea, entangled in landscapes that pulse with history, sensuality, and potential.
The title of the exhibition, Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning, is borrowed from an essay by William Kentridge, but it might just as easily be Johnson’s manifesto. Here, he challenges the ways meaning can be so often imposed—particularly in relation to the mythologized vision of Jamaica as a tourist paradise. Johnson’s canvases, however, are not about escape in the literal sense; they are about freedom. About letting go. About embracing complexity. This is most powerfully embodied in the painting The Sea Is Another Country, a striking and evocative work that feels as though it’s been pulled straight from the depths of the ocean itself.
The Sea Is Another Country draws inspiration from Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, a meditation on the transatlantic slave trade and the trauma it inflicted upon the African diaspora. Here, the figure—both human and not—finds itself suspended in an oceanic landscape of colors so lush they seem to bleed off the edges of the canvas. Johnson’s hunching figure seems submerged in a sea of fluid shapes and vibrant hues, trapped between rupture and reconciliation. It is a reflection of Brand’s idea of the sea as a carrier of trauma, but also as a space where transformation and re-imagination occur. This tension between trauma and transcendence permeates the entire exhibition, making it both haunting and liberating.
Johnson’s paintings are a masterclass in abstraction, yet they never stray far from the visceral pulse of figurative presence. His figures, though abstracted, carry with them a depth of narrative—one that touches on memory, history, folklore, and queer experience. The works pulse with the same electric energy as the artist’s own story—growing up in Jamaica, where queerness often had to hide in the shadows, and then migrating to Chicago, where the waters of Lake Michigan seem to speak in an entirely different language.
Take, for example, The Centipede Under Two Skies (Anansi #27), a piece that draws on Johnson’s fascination with Anansi, the trickster spider of West African folklore. Anansi’s ability to shapeshift, to defy categories and expectations, makes him the perfect figure for Johnson’s own engagement with identity and queer existence. The painting evokes a memory from Johnson’s youth, where queer men in Jamaica would gather in secret, finding freedom in the margins. The scene here—a bush party, a swirling, almost dreamlike dance of charcoal limbs and floating classroom chairs—speaks to the complexity of being in a world that demands you to disappear. As Johnson explained during a walk-through of the show, this piece reflects a journey from “clarity and visibility into a kind of wilderness, into darkness.” The abstraction here isn’t just aesthetic; it’s a metaphor for the liminal, elusive spaces where queer identities take root.
But the stories Johnson tells are far from fixed. They are mutable, slippery, and full of tension—especially when filtered through the lens of fugitivity. This concept, central to the exhibition, refers to the ways in which Black queer identities must often move in and out of visibility, creating spaces where freedom can flourish beyond the rigid constraints of societal definition. The very materials Johnson uses—charcoal, logwood dye, indigo, gold flakes—are part of this conversation. Logwood, in particular, is a significant and almost magical material for Johnson. Historically used in Jamaica’s colonial economy for the export of black dye, it represents both the permanence of Blackness and its fluidity: in certain lighting, the dye transforms from black to red, to blue, to brown—just as the meaning of Blackness, for Johnson, is never static. It is always shifting.
The use of these materials is not just poetic; it’s personal. Johnson’s commitment to creating his own pigments—blending raw pigments, fabric dye, and rabbit skin glue—imbues the work with an intimacy and alchemy that speaks to the artist’s relationship with both his heritage and his craft. This meticulous process of painting, where the painter’s hand is always present, feels both sacred and sensuous. The result is an exhibition full of lush textures, tantalizing colors, and a kind of velvety blackness that pulls you in, making you feel as though you’re walking through a dream.
In Like a Deep Breath Held and Held, one of the most visually intimate works in the show, two figures float above a fragmented sea, entwined in an embrace that feels both tender and surreal. This painting, like many in the exhibition, seems to capture the liminal space where intimacy and abstraction coexist—where the body dissolves into the landscape, and the landscape, in turn, shapes the body. The figures are delicate, ephemeral, yet impossible to look away from. This is an exhibition that makes you feel something. It’s a rare experience in the art world—one that asks for vulnerability, for deep engagement, for allowing yourself to be swept up by the power of the work, much as one might be carried away by the sea.
Throughout the exhibition, Johnson’s work insists on a kind of unmooring. The figures that emerge from his canvases are neither fully human nor fully animal, neither fully mythic nor fully real. This is the beauty of abstraction in Johnson’s hands: it allows for everything to be in flux, to be undefined, to be multiple. There’s something deeply liberating about this ambiguity, something that challenges the constraints of both history and identity. By invoking Anansi, Johnson not only reclaims the trickster figure as a queer icon, but also creates a space for freedom from the tyranny of meaning, where what we see is always shifting, always evolving, and always up for reinterpretation.
Leasho Johnson’s Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning is a feast for the senses, a rich, complex exploration of history, identity, and myth that speaks to the ways in which we constantly negotiate the spaces between visibility and invisibility, between freedom and constraint. It is a celebration of the power of abstraction, of the importance of myth and imagination, and of the ever-shifting, ever-evolving complexity of queer Black life. And above all, it is an invitation to let go of definitions, to embrace the wildness of being, and to step into a world where meaning is not a trap, but a constant unfolding.
