page_title: Natasha Johns-Messenger
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Natasha Johns-Messenger / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Natasha Johns-Messenger, Automated Logic, NEW 06, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 2006. Curated by Juliana Engberg
context_page_description: Natasha Johns-Messenger is an Australian conceptual artist and filmmaker, who has lived and worked in New York since winning the Green Card lottery in 2005. Johns-Messenger is best known for her large-scale site-determined installations that examine spatial perception and light. Her work is a complex process of imitation, illusion and trickery, often activated by architectural interventions and optical physics.
  Johns-Messenger's practice includes photography, digital painting and sculpture.
context_section_description: Johns-Messenger employs the principles of architecture, film and the visual arts to produce a new experiential sculptural framework. She creates representations or abstractions from the original architecture, using material devices such as, periscopic mirrors, live video projections and architectural mimicry to produce large-scale installations. Her interest in quantum physics, mathematics, seriality and geometry is also implemented within her practice.
  Johns-Messenger critically examines the role of the body in space. Her primary concern with altering ordinary "ways of seeing" began during early childhood, where she spent days sketching, conceptualising and photographing shapes from ordinary objects.
  Johns-Messenger commenced her art practice as a painter. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours in 1994, and in 2000 she completed a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). She has exhibited at major institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and the  Contemporary Centre for Photography in Melbourne. 
  In 2012 Johns-Messenger completed an MFA in Film at Columbia University, New York, marking a shift into narrative film, where she combines her interest with abstraction and the moving image into real time. Blackwood, her final graduate film at Columbia, won numerous awards at the 2012 Columbia University Film Festival, including the Alumni Award for Best Film, National Board of Review Motion Pictures Award and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Best Director Award. Blackwood went on to premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival and was featured in 40 film festivals and won numerous awards. Her first film after graduation, Off-Ramp, won Best Student Film and Best Actress at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival.
caption: Natasha Johns-Messenger, Automated Logic, NEW 06, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 2006. Curated by Juliana Engberg
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