Transposition

October 23 – December 12, 2026

Adrian Johnston

Opening Reception and Gallery Talk
Saturday, November 21, 2026 | 3:30-6:30 p.m.
Barrington Center for the Arts

The Laments: How Fragile; 2025

About the Exhibition

Transposition is the movement of something from one place, register, or condition into another, or two or more things actually changing places. A melody can move into another key without ceasing to be the same melody. An arrangement of words on a page, or through tone of utterance, become poetry, or take on new sensibility. An ordinary object can enter a gallery and become something else—not because its material has changed, but because its place, context, and relationships have changed. 

I am drawn to this threshold within making: when materials become more than materials, accumulation becomes form, and form becomes a place of encounter, even relationship. The work inhabits the space between yes and no, presence and absence, material and meaning, memory and anticipation. And ultimately points beyond place—not a zero-sum exchange, but a transformation that produces more than new ground, even abundantly fruitful ground. The broken body can be resurrected rather than discarded; the landscape can become communion rather than commodity or scenery; the fragment can participate in a whole greater than itself. 

I think of the work as inter-fragmented, as things remain distinct yet inseparable from what is larger. Or, perhaps, expressing interfragramentation: each image retains its particularity within an integrating resonance in which dependent things strive in a movement that makes rest possible. 

-Adrian Johnston

About the Artist

Adrian Johnston is a Boston-based artist. The influences of eastern and western traditions of visual imagery, and the athletic and musical disciplines of movement have provided him a score for interdisciplinary explorations, a process including drawing, painting, and time-based media. His work is the layered sediment of these explorations. It is also the fabric where the warp of relationship with God and with land, and the weft of relationship with others and self is woven in image, and often, through narrative form, inviting the viewer to trace their own historical, cultural, and metaphorical channels. Johnston received the 2025 St. Botolph’s Emerging Artist Award in Painting. He holds an MFA from Clark University and a BFA from the University of Iowa. He maintains a studio practice in Lawrence, MA, teaching drawing, painting, and illustration, and currently lives in Greater Boston with his wife and two sons.