Sarah Anne Johnson

Sarah Anne Johnson says that the key elements in her work are ‘adventure, spiritual fulfilment and giving back to Nature’. She graduated with an MFA from Yale in 2004 and showed her first body of work, ‘Tree Planting’ (2003–5) at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York in 2005. She has just had her second show, ‘The Galapagos Project’, at the Plug In ICA in her home-town of Winnipeg.

‘Tree Planting’ was the product of a three-year engagement with a common Canadian rite of passage – summer employment in reforestation, in this case in northern Manitoba. The first year Johnson planted; the second year she planted and took photographs. In the third year she mostly photographed friends and co-workers engaged in body-grinding hard work, covered in dirt, assaulted by insects and the weather, blistered, sore, exhausted to breaking point and then afterwards, in the fine dusk light, sharing beer, camaraderie, pain and pleasure. These photographs are infused with a sense of a community engaged in work of value, riding out the hard stuff and achieving what Johnson recognized was a transient Utopia.

‘Tree Planting’ was installed salon-style on a curved wall, like a diorama. Some of the colour photographs were documentary but when she couldn’t catch the moment, or when the event wasn’t recorded, Johnson recreated it. Drawing on her undergraduate experience in theatre, on her skills as both actor and set builder, and using a modelling material called Sculpey, she made the characters she needed. ‘The photographs of real people are grounded in reality’, she said. ‘The photographs of the dolls are more about metaphor and memory.’ The artifice amplifies the manner in which the work is apprehended, leaving it open-ended, and encourages the confusion she wants between the real and the staged.

The Path Triptych mixes the two nicely. The photo on the left shows a diagonal path through a clearing to a stand of slender, dark tree trunks; the middle photograph is a closely framed shot of a young woman asleep on a saffron-coloured sleeping bag, while the third photo is a construct. A wooden plank walkway leads over a forest floor, branches arc, and, in the distance a smudge of light shines through a break in the trees. Each part of the triptych is equally credible and engaging.

‘The Galapagos Project’ (2005–6) involves volunteers clearing paths, replanting natural vegetation and supporting the equatorial islands’ ecology – social engagement with the environment. Johnson, too, wielded a machete, cut down invading plant species, set seedlings and carried water up and down hills to ensure their growth. But there are a number of shifts in the project. This new installation includes a variety of media: a diorama of colour photographs, five spare and beautifully rendered paintings, a wall of four large black and white photographic portraits, three photographs of colour spreads of the Galapagos taken from back issues of National Geographic magazine, five of the dolls set in their own wall recess, and a constructed model of the house occupied by the workers, including the artist herself.
There was a shift, too, in the struggle that engaged Johnson in both situations. In ‘Tree Planting’ it had been with the aching physical labour and the environment. In the Galapagos, where most of her co-workers were much younger, she found the struggle was navigating and observing the group dynamics, a situation she described as ‘Lord of the Flies, but with young girls and supervision’.

With ‘Tree Planting’ Johnson wanted to represent the fleeting achievement of the sublime, to give the viewer a sense that, however briefly, a small, harmonious society had been attained. It was coloured by her interest not in presenting an ongoing narrative – that she left to each viewer to supply – but in staging and recapturing a dramatic moment or specific memory. The focus of the Galapagos work was not as deeply familiar and located. The personal engagement, the community of like-minded colleagues that led to the Utopic sense, has been replaced by a heightened feeling of romanticism that, like many of the photographs, is both real and manufactured.

The final piece in the Galapagos installation, The House, becomes a metaphor for the way in which Johnson understood her sojourn in the islands. Mirroring actual experience, the lighting in the miniature rooms consists of a single bulb or candles. A hazy light is filtered through mosquito netting; an orange glow seeps between slats in the wood; a figure is seen in silhouette through a window and against the darkening night; a woman preparing for bed lifts her T-shirt over her head; someone, alone, stares out from an upper-storey window. The artist is one of these figures. She said she felt isolated when she was there, solitary, an island on an island. The modelled house, her lived-in surrogate, is lit from within. It sits afloat a white plinth in the darkened room.