October 11 — November 22, 2025
I Am the Spell
Johnny Floyd
The works in I Am the Spell are an attempt at invocation. They are the result of a meditative approach to process, seeking to create objects that perform as temporal cenotaphs.
Composed through layered processes of disruption and reconstitution, these paintings are an attempt to push beyond the surface plane. These are not pictures. The folks in these paintings are spells.
This shift toward rupture, materiality, and time-based presence responds to the conditions of the moment: a moment defined by the smooth acceleration of automated systems, where creative labor is increasingly abstracted and aesthetic histories are flattened into algorithmic sameness. Within this context, the cultural and visual languages of Black people—already historically extracted, commodified, and misrepresented—are further threatened by erasure.
These works reject that disappearance. They exist as things made by a hand, grounded in the rituals, memories, and embodied knowledge that shape Black experience. In this light, the paintings become a portal; they endeavor to serve as one of the many monuments to our presence and waypoints of truth to which our descendants can return.
The spell is not illusion.
It is a methodology.
A technology.
A lineage.
A responsibility.
The spell is the work.
The spell is the presence.
We are the spell. You are the spell.
Johnny Floyd is a self-taught artist working between Detroit, Michigan and Atlanta, Georgia. His profound work recognizes the necessity for art as a means of historical documentation, examining the Black experience in America—past and present—while envisioning a viable Black future through a figurative, surrealistic, and abstracted approach.
Floyd has exhibited his work at several institutions, including the Rachofsky House, Olin Hall Galleries at Roanoke College, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Notable collections that hold his work include the Dallas Museum of Art and Roanoke College. This is his third solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery.