Audio, Installation
2022

Idiom 1 Plea Piece (Time is a Dimension) is a collaged audio piece made with a YouTube scrubber that finds instances where someone says the word “please” in a song. “Please” is a word that has a place in political conflicts, conflicts of justice, personal conflicts and desires. Johnson connects this private dimension of the heartfelt “pleases” recorded in music to wider, deeper crises that take the word closer to the plea and its core role in the field of radical political change. The question of who is granted permission and who only gets to infinitely ask for it weighs on the piece as the “pleases” voiced over the years begin to accumulate around the room taking up space and time. Johnson extracts these “pleases” from their contexts, exposing their idiomatic character, stressing the discord between their polite allegiance to social and linguistic convention and their vast residue of inefficacy, frustration, unmatched desires and unresolved injustice.