Herd on the Street

Walking through the ephemera-happy exhibit, one might feel as if Johnson is trying too hard to brain us with a bag of bricks. For example, one barely registers Ugly Eps's hand-screened words on pages ripped from a dictionary.

Mythos: AKA Jeff Meadows's anemic collages on wood pieces have little to say. A measly piece simply features a crumpled, empty pack of Camel cigarettes glued to a rotting chunk of wood. The San Fran artist has also glued photocopies of what appear to be cartoonish, pug-nosed amputees on aged wood and then petrified them with thick coats of varnish.

Foster City's Thylacine Graphics is represented by two drawings on multilingual manuals for computer equipment. One depicts a gazellelike creature sporting a suit and breathing out daffodils.

The exhibit also includes a modest sampling of zines by artists from New York, California, and England.

Johnson says she has also been collaborating with local collective Firefly, "a venue for creative breathing and imperfection," which runs a zine-lending library out of its NE 20th Street digs. Johnson invited the group to the opening reception to spread the DIY gospel to the crowd.

The unabashed DIYer says she is slowly discovering others happy to foster community among the Miami hipsters who remain off the grid.

"I wasn't too worried about trying to curate a show, but wanted more of a collaborative spirit to come through," Johnson says with a sigh. In her first effort out of the gate, it shows.