It’s an understatement to say that October has been busy for Sarah Anne Johnson. On top of creating this year’s Art Toronto MOCCA Benefit Edition, she recently (just on Thursday evening) debuted a new body of work at Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Today on the Art Toronto Stage, Johnson speaks with Border Crossings‘ Meeka Walsh at 4:30 p.m., and she unveils an installation at Toronto’s Louis Vuitton Maison just a few hours after that. Then, she’ll fly back to Alberta, where she’s been leading a program at the Banff Centre for several weeks. Here are seven things she has learned along the way.
Art About Climate Change Can Encompass Both Bleakness and Hope
Johnson’s Art Toronto MOCCA Benefit Edition, titled Gold Box, is an image featuring a gold-leafed rectangle that glints and floats atop an ominous, cloud-filled sky. The piece, says Johnson, “is a continuation from a body of work I did titled Arctic Wonderland, some of which was in the MOCCA exhibition ‘Spectral Landscapes’ last year. With that work, I was attempting to convey my worries and hopes for the future of the Arctic, and I did that by altering the surface of the photograph and also by creating two groups of images. One group was darker and bleaker, and the other was more hopeful. With Gold Box I was trying to convey both in one.”
Straight Photography Isn’t Enough For Artists Anymore
Johnson’s desire to enhance or alter images—in the MOCCA Benefit Edition and elsewhere—is in many ways a response to what the artist terms a “frustration with photography.” Being caught between the aesthetics of the medium and the inability to “take a straight photograph” has pushed the artist towards a sculptural approach, either by disturbing the surface of photographic images, constructing scenes to then be photographed, or employing unconventional materials. The artist says that the medium’s liberation from any type of “true” photographic representation is a direct result of the collapse between art photography and documentary/journalistic photography. The latter, she says “looks like art photography. It’s caught up in this aesthetic that artists created and now we [artists] can’t do it anymore.”
Glitter, Googly Eyes And Gold Leaf Can Be Good
Johnson has a particular skill at taking materials that are out of favour in the avant-garde art world and making them work in the white cube. Her breakthrough works in the early 2000s, for instance, made use of the craft-store staple Sculpey. In the MOCCA Benefit Edition, gold leaf “has been applied [to the photograph] in a way so that parts of it sort of float off the surface and give it the effect of looking like it’s either being put together or has already started falling apart. The gold leaf reflects light in a really beautiful way and the look of it will change over the course of the day depending on how the light is shining onto it. Even just viewing it from different vantage points in the room, it’ll capture or repel light differently as you walk by, so it can get kind of dull-looking or also become quite brilliant.” These experiments have been carried further into Johnson’s most recent body of work Wonderlust, on display at Julie Saul until December, which applies glitter, googly eyes and (yes) gold foil to photos of people engaged in intimate or sexual acts. (She has also cut into, bleached and burned some of the photos in the Wonderlust series.)
Art Fairs Don’t Often Reflect the Origins of Artmaking
In addition to creating Gold Box for the MOCCA Benefit Edition and speaking at Art Toronto today, Johnson also has work on display at the fair booth of Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery. However, large-scale commercial fairs are something she feels a certain ambivalence towards. “I don’t really like going to them,” she says of fairs. “I’ve tried it out a couple of times—because, you know, it should be fun and exciting seeing so much work. But it’s not how the art was intended to be shown…. Most artists don’t make their work with the intention of it being shown in an art fair. It’s made to be in a specific space, and so to put it in another space where the sole purpose is to sell, sell, sell, and buy, buy, buy—it’s just too much for me.”
Lenticular Prints Are More Current Than You Might Think
At Stephen Bulger’s booth are lenticular print postcards that came out of a recent project for the BMO Project Room—a small space on the 68th floor of a Toronto office tower. That mixed-media installation, Asleep in the Forest, features a large diorama that visitors can only view via a peephole in the gallery door. The accompanying print, also titled Asleep in the Forest and now on view at Bulger’s Queen West gallery, plays with illusions of depth and dimension; it requires viewers to move back and forth to get the full optical effect of the scene. “I like [lenticular prints] because it’s sort of low-brow, sort of ‘low art,'” Johnson says. “You see it on the cover of TV guides or CDs, and I like playing with that high art/low art [dynamic] and switching the function of it.” The other photo she is showing at the Bulger booth, related to her new Wonderlust series, isn’t lenticular but breaks the image up into prismatic shapes that echo the way a lenticular print works.
It’s Possible To Bring a Muddy Music Festival into Louis Vuitton—Sort Of
Beyond the fair, Johnson is in Toronto to unveil her commission for the Louis Vuitton Maison store window on Bloor Street tonight. “It’s a photograph that I painted on and the image is from a music festival that I’ve been going to for years; it’s a picture of three guys and they have paint on them,” explains Johnson. “My general interest in photography is showing what something looks like, but also what it feels like. Photography can give you the facts—or ‘factiness’—and can show you what a place looks like. But by painting on it, or scratching on it, or altering the surface or image in any way, I can describe what a space feels like psychologically—what it feels like to be there.”
Leading a Residency Can Help You Make Artwork, But Not While You’re Actually There
Johnson has spent much of her time since late September running a studio program titled “Another World in the Studio” at the Banff Centre, which she will return to following her brief and frenzied visit east. The thrust of the program is something she terms “work time” for artists to make, gather and discuss, before going off and making some more. “There are studio visits and some guest lecturers that come to do one-on-ones. I do one-on-ones. We do group ‘show-and-tells,’ or I guess you could call it a group critique, once a week where a couple of people show what they’ve been working on and we discuss it,” explains Johnson. When asked if she was getting any artwork done in Banff herself, she replies, “None. No.” But having the deadline of the residency was a helpful push in wrapping up ongoing projects. “The day before I came [to Banff] I mailed off three pretty major things”—namely the MOCCA Benefit Edition, the work for Louis Vuitton and the images for Julie Saul’s exhibition—”so I’m taking a break.”
This article is part of Canadian Art’s daily coverage of Art Toronto 2013. For updates, visit canadianart.ca/arttoronto. Also visit us at Booth 940 for daily 2 p.m. talks and more.
This article was corrected on October 26, 2013. The original copy erroneously stated that Johnson’s Asleep in the Forest print was on view at Stephen Bulger’s Art Toronto booth; in fact, it is on view at Bulger’s Queen West gallery. Postcards of the print are available at the booth.
