Erin Johnson: The Way Things Can Happen

Essex Flowers is pleased to present Erin Johnson’s solo exhibition _The Way Things Can Happen_ which revisits _The Day After_ (1983), the landmark made-for-television film depicting a nuclear attack on Kansas. Produced at the height of the Cold War, _The Day After_ was filmed on location in Lawrence, Kansas, with a cast of more than 5,000 local residents. Blurring the distinction between everyday life and cinematic fiction, the film achieved the urgency and scale of live coverage of a national catastrophe, becoming one of the most-watched and politically consequential television broadcasts in American history and energizing anti-nuclear activism in the United States. In Johnson’s multi-channel video installation, former extras from _The Day After_ recall scenes in which they performed more than four decades ago. They recount their memories without reference to the movie itself, describing instead experiences of panic, evacuation, injury, loss, and survival. As the distinction between performance and lived experience begins to dissolve, the work creates a space where fictional catastrophe and personal memory become inseparable. _The Way Things Can Happen_ asks what it means for a city to perform its own destruction. Through the embodied memories of Lawrence residents, Johnson examines how imagined futures are woven into lived experience and how cultural anxieties persist across generations. The work unfolds across multiple temporalities at once: the Cold War, the decades that followed, the escalation of nuclear fears in the present, and the act of recollection itself.