Sarah Anne Johnson | Woodland

Sarah Anne Johnson incorporates paint and other materials into her photographs of nature. A sense of connecting and belonging to the landscape and an ongoing questioning of photographic representation inform her new mixed media work depicting trees. In the viewing room, a video of the artist in her studio in Winnipeg will introduce sources of her recent work and provide insight into her art-making practice. Images of never-before-seen new artworks slated for Johnson’s upcoming exhibition at the gallery will be on view.

For the past two years, Sarah Anne Johnson has taken photographs in the forests of her native Manitoba. These printed photographs of trees develop from Johnson’s feelings of intimacy and integration with the natural world. From indigenous societies who preserve ways of knowing the world in relationship to the land, to modern scientific researchers testing the ability of trees to communicate intelligently, Johnson draws inspiration from the transcendent and healing properties of nature. After photographing the trees, Johnson makes pigment prints and works intuitively to transform the prints into active grounds for her mixed media pieces, applying both fine art and unconventional materials such as paint, photo-spotting ink and gold or brass leaf across their surfaces.

The painted photographs at times exhibit dense grids of dots and dashes; small, biomorphic shapes stenciled in acrylic that float on the surface of the photograph; or as in CDMC, 2020, triangular stains of oil paint that have been painted freehand, to trace the negative space between tree branches and simulate stained glass windows in houses of worship. Johnson’s added forms represent with paint and brush what the eye and camera cannot apprehend; not only communication between plants, but, just as importantly, her material and spiritual experience of the landscape. “I do this to create a more honest image,” says Johnson. “To show not just what I saw, but how I feel about what I saw.”