An unmistakable softness

An unmistakable softness is a collection of new work Leasho Johnson created during a three-month residency in New Providence. Johnson’s second solo exhibition at TERN, this exhibition runs from January 23rd, 2025, to March 8th, 2025.

Over the past three months, Johnson transitioned his studio to NINE, a private studio complex in Chippingham, in downtown Nassau. An abstract painter, Johnson explored how his formula and process-oriented painting practice could develop in the tropics. Though Johnson’s artistic career started in his home country of Jamaica, he created and developed this approach to painting over the past seven years in Chicago, Illinois. Crafting particular paints, pigments, and textures, this body of work is a fruition of how the formula of the work responds to varying conditions and how the environment poses such variations. Still grounded in his well-known aesthetics, compositions, and textures, An unmistakable softness is a culmination of his observations of this landscape and its temporal effects on his artmaking visualized through his ongoing “Anansi” and portrait series.

An unmistakable softness references negotiations of queer visibility, perception, and survival that arose during Johnson’s stay in New Providence. He asserts that there is something within queer people, the ability to identify other queer individuals, by recognizing a “conjured visual hardness”— a visual hardness, that things are what they seem, an opacity that only other queer people can see through. Furthermore, Johnson notes the similarities in architecture and constructed spaces between The Bahamas and Jamaica uphold these fixtures of society. And how these fit into a contradiction, an uneasiness with the idea of home—home being the Caribbean. Though The Bahamas and Jamaica are islands within the Caribbean, the intimacy and familiarity of space are misleading; they are not the same. So Johnson weaves imagery from his homestead into the work, settling his figures again into his imagined and distorted sugarcane fields of Jamaica. Obscuring and isolating the figures within this historic site of existentialism and extraction, Johnson contends with this history through the construction and deconstruction of tricksters as a means of working through perceptions of black masculinity, queerness, and displacement.

While the “Anansi” series centers on shapeshifters and fluidity between the subject and background, Johnson’s portraits usually exist without surroundings. He renders loved ones into stylized anthropomorphic portraits and weaves sentimentality and their essence into intimate, honest paintings. Furthermore, he does not appease the audience by beautifying his subjects, but he allows each portrait to exist as complicated and visceral as necessary for an accurate representation. An unmistakable softness features the breadth of Johnson’s practice, which the Caribbean atmosphere has influenced during his residency. Johnson allows us to consider the possibility of migratory diasporic practices and introduces the audience to his practical musings.