Sarah Anne Johnson: Nature All In

Sarah Anne Johnson, who lives in Winnipeg, is an inventive, never-run-out-of-ideas kind of artist. She is basically a photographer, although she has worked as a sculptor and installation artist, with side excursions into painting, drawing, video and theatre. Out of these disciplines, she has always been able to generate things to make, which is why she was surprised to find in 2024 that she had no idea where to go with her art. In retrospect, she sees her creative block as an aftershock from COVID. Along with much of the world, she was unable to decide on a direction to take.

She ultimately decided the way to move forward was by going back into her own archive; she found there a small body of work and a way of presenting it that opened up a new set of possibilities. The images that became her “Mountain Series” were a set of 14 photographs she had taken while on a week-long horseback trek on the edge of Jasper National Park with a group of friends in 2018. “It wasn’t a proper tour with a professional guide. My friend who set up the trip would look at a mountain and say, ‘Let’s see if we can make it to the tippy-top.’” Johnson remembers it was a combination of adventure and danger. “We would cut a trail and zigzag up the side of the mountain and then find we couldn’t move because there were so many trees. You can’t turn a horse around on a steep cliff, so we would get off our horses and cut down a couple of trees with an axe.” They were sharing the park with grizzly bears, and for a day or two they couldn’t find water. “We were really off-roading, and it was pretty intense.” Nothing connected with the experience was planned, including taking photographs. When she saw them again six years later, the images told her two things: because they were out of focus, they lacked the resolution needed to make them large-scale; and that limitation suggested she build frames for her work. She took pre-existing wooden frames and, using a mixture of cardboard with two-part epoxy, she created something unique. Each frame took on different rhythms and contours. They were fanciful, a mix of folk art and shapes that looked as if a landscape had been transformed into decorative meringue. Johnson associates them with the mountainous rough terrain she had been in, as well as with clouds and thought balloons. They accomplished something else she had wanted to do for some time: constructing the frames was a way of getting back into sculpture.

In the nine pictures she selected, she added different degrees of colour to the surface, often printing half the picture in black and white and half in colour. In A Mountain (all the images in the series are from 2025), the sky and the foreground are minimally rendered, whereas in Day One and Following a Path, the packed provisions on the back of the horse, and the horse itself, are richly coloured. In The Valley, the pigment is painterly in its application and the colour is laid down as if it were contributing to an abstraction and not attempting to more clearly articulate an object, animal, or space.

The “Cedar Forest” works are spectacular. They are large pigment prints with oil paint, gold leaf and holographic tape. Done before the “Mountain Series,” their intense colour moves towards the hallucinogenic. Johnson says that every photograph had a set colour palette and a set form, which determined the degree of alteration she could bring to the image. She regards her working process as an exploration through which she is “figuring out different moves, different ways of applying paint, and different ways of playing with the brush strokes and the way the colour hits the picture. Every picture presents a different problem to solve.” The variation of colour—where it occurs and what it does to the surface—is irresistible. Johnson’s reading of Pink Secret is that the picture “lends itself more to a narrative vibe that provides a deeper sense of space. I could paint the leaves on the forest floor like a path to this gorgeous deep grove moving deeper into the woods. I’m always going deeper to find out what’s behind this section of trees.” Purple Stump, a vertical picture in which the stump sits resolutely in the middle of the composition, is a kind of portrait. It is Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights gone botanical. In Yellow Light (Cedar Forest), coloured shapes hang in the trees as if the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream were gambolling about the British Columbia forest.

Johnson had been taking pictures in the forest during a number of return visits, and her initial thought was to exhibit them “as a way of recreating the energetic healing space I feel when I’m in the forest. I’m being pretty obvious in the way that I’m referencing houses of worship. It’s that feeling of being connected to the sublime.” In Glow (Cedar Forest), she paints shapes that are reminiscent of fragments of stained-glass windows. Many of these pictures reinforce the idea of the forest as a natural cathedral. This is territory that Emily Carr had painted, but Johnson’s inhabitation is without people; it is nature exploding into its own exuberance. In previous work, Johnson has been attentive to the damage humans have inflicted on nature. For “Winnipeg Now,” a 2012 group exhibition curated to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, she included an installation from her “Arctic Series” in which the fabricated fireworks above a model schooner were emblems less of celebration than witnessing a desperate party at the end of the world.

In “A Mountain and a Forest,” her take on the human/nature dynamic has changed. “There used to be anxiety and fear in the work, and I don’t feel that in the same way. I know climate change is real, and species will die off and very difficult times are coming for humans on the planet. But when I think about nature, I’m thinking deep past and deep future. Nature is the one thing that will be fine; it will come back again. I’m thinking beyond humans.” Her faith is in nature’s resilience and in its capacity to outlast our obdurate resistance. The message carried in her new work is strangely calming; she has turned resignation into an attribute of faith. As a result, the “Cedar Forest” work ignores our presence and offers us a world of enduring and radiant beauty. It puts us in the space imagined by Lorna Crozier in her gorgeously named 1985 collection of poems, The Garden Going On Without Us. As the written poem goes, so goes the painted photographs. Sarah Anne Johnson’s forest is the natural “garden going on without us.” ❚

“A Mountain and a Forest” was on exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York from March 13 to April 26, 2025.