It's hard to believe that more people aren't bilingual, but it's especially confounding in this city. When we think of language barriers, we don't always consider the one between the deaf and the hearing populations. Largely because of RIT, Rochester has an enormous and thriving deaf community, and the non-integration isn't something I reflect on everyday. I had another reminder of this unnecessary divide when I viewed Dr. Paul Johnston‘s mixed-media masks and drawings. Johnston is deaf, but he doesn't want anyone's pity. His art is bright and whimsical on the surface, but rife with linguistic, educational, and individualist philosophy as well.

Johnston wants to teach outsiders about the experiences within deaf culture, and diminish incorrect assumptions hearing people make about the deaf community. He also seeks to instill within other deaf individuals a sense of pride, freedom, and capability.

Johnston was born deaf to hearing parents, and while he had been exposed to American sign language, he attended schools that upheld the oralist philosophy. That way of teaching takes for granted that deaf students should be able to "think" sound-based language the same as hearing students, but without having had access to the sounds. Johnston had already started to build a firm deaf identity, and was determined to choose his own avenue of acquiring language.

In high school he developed a fascination with art, with the basic elements of design, line, shapes - still evident in the strong compositions of his multiple, Escher-reminiscent "NonSense Cities" ink and watercolor pieces - "though at the time I was not aware I had a deaf identity," he said in a recent interview with City. During his first year in college, he took several deaf studies courses, and grew an "appreciation of who I am as a deaf person, a bicultural American," he says.

Johnston was the first deaf person to earn a BFA in furniture design and woodworking from RIT, and later performed with the Connecticut-based National Theatre of the Deaf, became an instructor and director of experimental theater, and earned a master's degree and a doctorate in art education, with a minor in sculpture and philosophy. He currently teaches at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. and is part of the De'VIA group, an organization of deaf artists "with the intention of expressing innate cultural or physical deaf experience," per its website (deafart.org).

"My art draws a parallel between the poetic beauty of signs and gestures to the expression of mood and emotion on the face or in the voice," per Johnston's artist's statement. Hearing people might assume that ASL is a sort of bland cipher for English, but it's really a language with its own grammatical structure, and through the nuance of gesture, contains as much complexity as the spoken word. It relies on facial expression as much as the signs and finger spelling. Johnston has spent time as an ASL instructor, teaching others how to see and read tone and pitch in facial expressions, to further fill in the meaning of the signing. If deaf people didn't use the face as an indicator, "we wouldn't be sure how people felt," he says.

The variety present in his dozens of colorful "Mythological Masks" pieces symbolizes the individuality of people within the deaf community, and specifically Johnston's four identities of performer, learner, communicator, and worker. But he also sees the masks, which incorporate both faces and hands, as icons: just as the Greek gods were symbolic of aspects of crucial things and themes in Greek experience, Johnston wants to emphasize the import of hands, eyes, and faces in deaf culture, and use these powerful identities to encourage deaf youth to use their imagination and shape their own world. "Fantasy as opposed to politics," he says.

Music plays an important role in Johnson's work; he incorporates it in the sheet music present in the masks, as well as the abstract pastel pieces, like the flowing, expressive "Visual Musical Note." Johnston says that family would always say to him that they were sorry that he couldn't hear birds, or music. "They always pitied me, and I didn't need that," he says. He enjoys understanding the world through seeing it: "I don't have to depend on sounds," he says. He uses music as a metaphor for the different structures of the grammar of different languages. Each color and line in "Visual Musical Note" symbolizes a part of the structure of sign language.

In the "Cityscapes" drawings, the viewer is not always among the buildings, but floating apart, above, below the scene, peeking into countless spaces and dwellings, or looking from a distance at a city-covered sphere haloed in a saturated color. The dream-like scenes are not populated, but the twisting, winding, half-hidden spaces are imbued with a sense of freedom, bereft of obstructions to the open exploration and joy of imaginative discovery.

To Johnston, art is philosophy, and a means of deeply understanding individual existence. He's also interested in documenting the deaf experience: "In the future, scientists will probably develop solutions to most of the causes of deafness," he says. "The population will be smaller, the art will be history, documentation of historical experience, information for scientists and researchers see how deaf individuals lived."

Paul Johnston: "Handscapes, Cityscapes, & Mythology"

Through May 1

NTID Dyer Arts Center, RIT Campus, 52 Lomb Memorial Dr.

475-6884, ntid.rit.edu/dyerarts