Sarah Anne Johnson This Land
This exhibition includes work from Sarah Anne Johnson’s two most recent series, which continue to chronicle her fascination regarding human impact and interaction with the environment. Johnson makes traditional colour landscape photographs that depict sublime natural beauty. In Rosy-Fingered Dawn she uses a broad combination of materials, including craft supplies such as plastic flowers and cotton balls, to mock traditional ideas of high art, and to magnify dark truths about our relationship with the environment. These interventions gently push the viewer to question our complicated connection to nature and photography. Instead of harmoniously fusing the real and ideal, Johnson plays with parallel lives by forcing together contradictions—high and low, sincerity and mockery, delight and suspicion. The emotional push and pull implicates the viewer, in contrast to the distance of cool criticality. Her more recent untitled work is situated in forests, depicting humans in light dappled with colours, similar to that of a church interior illuminated through stained-glass windows. These spaces are bereft of the anxiety that permeates the vast landscapes of Rosy-Fingered Dawn, offering a place of quiet refuge.
Sarah Anne Johnson (b. 1976) lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a photo-based artist who uses a variety of media in realizing her work. Johnson studied Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba and completed her Graduate studies at the Yale School of Art in 2004. Johnson has been the recipient of many awards and grants, has participated in several residencies, and has received a number of commissions. Her work can be found in numerous private and corporate collections across North America.