Sarah Anne Johnson for Border Crossings at Art Toronto 2019
Sarah Anne Johnson
For Border Crossings at Art Toronto 2019
October 25 – 27, Booth B12
Sarah Anne Johnson
Three Gold Rectangles
2019
inkjet print with applied rose gold leaf
17.5 x 24”
edition of 25
Border Crossings is presenting a Varied Edition print by Sarah Anne Johnson — a beautiful and searing image of the Natural world today.
Border Crossings has commissioned a Varied Edition print from Winnipeg-based artist, Sarah Anne Johnson. She has produced 25 unique prints of a searing image which, for its beauty and its urgency, will impress itself on your eye.
From the outset of her career Sarah Anne Johnson has located herself firmly in the environment and identified it as her critical topic. In her new work, she proceeds on this course. With her unwavering aesthetic balance and concision, this image, Three Gold Rectangles, 2019, inkjet print with applied rose gold leaf, 17.5 x 24,” edition of 25, addresses the imperiled condition to which we have brought the world. Our beautiful planet is on fire. It is ablaze as a result of our carelessness and our avidity.
The image shows a luscious mauve to peach to aqua sky, vast behind a black-shadowed, low horizon of trees and brush. The sun has set in an atmosphere made nacrous by fire, smoke, pollution. We have done this and Nature has made it beautiful. But it can’t go on. Looming, hovering in the foreground are three rose gold columns, pillars on fire. The exploitation of the Amazon rainforest, our lusting after wealth, the sun too hot, too near or perhaps, more optimistically and with hope for the future, the sun aglow with warmth and radiant beauty. Because the image is beautiful.
This work continues in an extended line from Sarah Anne Johnson’s early work, “Arctic Wonderland,” 2010, where the beauty of a pristine and remote northern landscape evidenced signs, even as far from human habitation as it was, of our careless incursions. In that body of work the rectangles imposed on the landscape were black and heavy as lead and foretold the imminent and destructive course on which we were moving. Here, almost a decade later Sarah Anne Johnson has moved from ice to fire. The situation is increasingly dire, the planet still beloved by the artist, and by us—our only home—and the heat from this new image both warms us and warns us.
As she has always been, Sarah Anne Johnson is Nature’s herald in art.
These prints will be available for $2,500 CDN each at the Border Crossings space at Art Toronto, booth B12.
