Sarah Anne Johnson – annetteandquebec

August 6, 2016

The McMichael Art Collection – Sarah Anne Johnson

In terms of the perpetuation of the species and the human life span, the period between 15 and 25 is the really crucial one. This is the period of maximum fertility and all its attendant characteristics: the fierce courage, idealism and passion that belong only to the young; and of course, on the dark side, the selfishness, fecklessness and brutality that hopefully dissipates with maturity. Looking back to this era in one’s own lifetime can produce feelings of awe and possibly an overriding sense of good fortune that we even survived at all. Sometimes we barely recognize our former selves and are obliged to murmur, almost inaudibly: “Was that idiot me?”

Sarah Anne Johnson wanders into this territory of youthful enthusiasm and misadventure in her exhibition called Field Trip, at the McMichael Collection.

Yellow Dinosaur by Sarah Anne Johnson

The “trip” Sarah Anne Johnson takes the viewer on is deep and quixotic, at times hilarious, contemplative and hopeful, and then suddenly frightening and grim. I really liked looking at this show. For me the dazzling images conjure up a sense of how perception is shared, how my own perceptions conform to contemporary custom and how they change.

Zombie Dance by Sarah Anne Johnson

I’ve been reading a book by Jenny Diski called The Sixties. She writes: “We were …a bunch of dissolute, hedonistic druggies. We lay around and got stoned, had sex, listened to music that exalted lying around, getting stoned, having sex, and hymned our good times.” It seems that fifty years later this is the same crowd that Sarah Anne Johnson has photographed. In her book Jenny Diski goes on to chronicle how the sixties became the Reagan years and turned into ” that beast: the Me generation.” Time will tell.

Chillin’ at the Void by Sarah Anne Johnson

Detail of Chillin’ at the Void by Sarah Anne Johnson

Sarah Anne Johnson intertwines so many interesting threads of thinking. The detail of Chillin’ at the Void depicts a new crop of “dissolute, hedonistic druggies.” It makes me think of a different kind of chill: a cold and dreadful chill, of how marketing and propaganda ease each generation through its own very special, unique and individual journey.

Group Portrait by Sarah Anne Johnson

In the piece entitled “Group Portrait” Sarah Anne Johnson captures the joy and satisfaction of belonging, so critical for the young. The individuals are obliterated with dopey masks and transformed in an instant to exotic creatures that have banded together. We will always be together!! We celebrate our originality! We defend our tribe!! It’s such a brief sentiment. Maybe only an afternoon or two. That weekend at Bird’s Hill Park.

Sarah Anne Johnson’s trip includes some dark alleys, strewn with garbage, seriously dangerous drugs and stoners slipping over the edge.

Blob by Sarah Anne Johnson

The lurid, day-glow monsters of nightmare and death are observed with nonchalance. This is an ability of the very young and very stoned, and a feature of their passage into the humdrum adult world….if all goes well.

Glitter Bomb by Sarah Anne Johnson

April 9, 2016

Lately I have been obsessed with getting to work on time. If I’m late I might not have a place to sit. There are always a few latecomers lugging their laptops down to Starbucks to set up shop for the day and I don’t want to be one of them. I tried working from home – some people (slackers?) seem to love it, but not me. My home life and my work life start to become one seamless parade with work edging out home until it seems like that’s all I do. I started going in to the office again, joining the flow of humanity on the TTC, earlier and earlier, 7:30, 7:20, 7:15…And then I remembered: Looking at Art in Toronto.

Trinity Square Video – Heather Phillipson

Trinity Square Video’s new location is not optimal for viewing. Skylights wash out the projected video images. (I was advised they are fixing the problem and custom blinds are on order.) Fortunately, the inaugural exhibition of the space features work by Heather Phillipson, and the show, titled “sub-fusc love-feast,” has such a powerful audio component that the diminished visual impact is hardly missed.

Installation view of sub-fusc love-feast by Heather Phillipson

Also, three video projection screens are tucked into an elaborate installation of cut out photographs. It’s like walking around in an oversized collage, cut out from cheerful travel postcards and National Geographic magazines.

Installation views of sub-fusc love-feast by Heather Phillipson

The layers of sound and music, dominated by a bell-like female voice, are completely absorbing. Heather Phillipson is a thinker and a poet. She takes on the slippery task of defining nature in this era of unrestrained production and gives voice to the places, things and animals caught in the terrifying cycles of consumption.

The piece has a plaintive, uncertain feel to it, the sound in particular grows panicky at times and fearful. This makes sense given the subject matter. Heather Phillipson explores the grim news that is easier to deny than accept; the scale and finality of the environmental crisis that looms over us all.

Gallery 44 – Sarah Anne Johnson

The victim of a medical experiment, perpetrated without the consent or knowledge of patients, Sarah Ann Johnson’s grandmother suffered crippling depression and agoraphobia following her treatment. Sarah Anne Johnson explores this trauma, which continues to ripple through generations of her family, in a video installation called The Kitchen.

Still from The Kitchen by Sarah Anne Johnson

On numerous monitors we watch short loops of a woman, alone, on a kind of stage set which is a kitchen. The clothes and decor signify the nineteen fifties. She wears a dress and heels but everything else is wrong. This woman is strangely afflicted, nuts probably. A mask is warn on the back of her head and a wig obscures her face. She carries out her lonely kitchen activities backwards, freakish, awkward, perpetually failing, occasionally crying out in frustration, hurling plates in this filthy kitchen where she seems to be trapped.

Still from The Kitchen by Sarah Anne Johnson

It’s fascinating to watch the intense and torturous contortions the woman performs to carry out simple tasks as our vision flips back and forth, trying to make sense of the impossible. And maybe that is what Sarah Anne Johnson is getting at: the misery of trying to succeed in an situation which is impossible.

Still from The Kitchen by Sarah Anne Johnson

In a separate room, a projected video in black and white, shows the same woman. She is still in the kitchen. Now she lies on the floor, trundling heavily in an abstract, compulsive manner.

In acting out these moments in the kitchen Sarah Anne Johnson may be re-creating childhood memories or simply seeking to understand her family and herself. The art work she comes up with has a strange tragic aspect to it, dark and painful.

May 9, 2015

….More Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

There are CONTACT exhibitions everywhere in Toronto this month; a coffee shop around the corner from me on Dundas West, the local organic supermarket even! Hard to get a good look at them through the vegetable misters, but they are there.

Bau-Xi Photo – Chris Shepherd

Kennedy Station Platform by Chris Shepherd

Is the essential character of a city reflected in its transportation systems or do the systems help to create the character? Think of the glamour of Montreal’s metro; its bold graphic styling and silently approaching trains, or the romance of New York’s subway, permanently embedded like its famous black and white, art deco tiles. Relatively, Toronto’s underground transportation has seemed somewhat mundane, workaday and all about function.

Pape Exit by Chris Shepherd

Chris Shepherd gets at the heart of the form and function connection in his exhibition at Bau Xi Photo. (I am actually the owner of some subway shots Chris Shepherd and I think it is because of looking at these photographs that I began to appreciate the aesthetic of Toronto’s subway.) Sadly, it is not glamour or romance that is at the core of Toronto; it is work. And the Toronto subway is in total harmony. The photographs of Chris Shepherd show us the modest pathways to our daily grind and reveal their perfection.

From BlogTO I learned the following:

The colours were chosen to discourage rowdy behaviour and loitering rather than for aesthetic reasons. Consequently, they have that institutional quality of hospital or penitentiary walls. For many years, Torontonians grumbled that their subway stations looked like public washrooms. But now, decades later, the remaining designs have become Modernist classics.

There has been a recent flurry of TTC projects to improve and concurrently embellish the existing underground system. It’s exciting to see a little civic preening going on in this city so focused on dogged achievement.

At Dufferin Station, Winnipeg artists Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shaski (of spmb) add blooms of pure colour, and big pixilated images to transform one of the most heavily used and rundown station of the Bloor line. Chris Shepherd documents this unrestrained use of colour so well. We can only hope it does not lead to loitering or rowdiness.

Dufferin Station by Chris Shepherd

And finally the hoardings have come down at Union Station. Big, messy, sketchbook style line drawings by Stuart Reid are revealed. The drawings, depicting TTC riders, have been blown up and transposed onto glass panels. They are fresh, unexpected, thoughtful, sensitive and kind of a shock relative to the relentless TTC grids and tiles.

Union Station panels by Stuart Reid

My current work address is near the Ferry terminal at the bottom of Bay Street. Wandering around the area at lunch time gives me the feeling the plastic wrap is coming off. Everything is shiny, clean and has that new car smell.

Across the street from me, draping the exterior of the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Center at 11 Bay Street is a public installation (also part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival) titled Best Beach by Sarah Anne Johnson. The piece is particularly stunning when seen from within the Waterpark food court at mid-day. At that time the whole place is flooded with light and Sarah Anne Johnson’s piece looms over the oblivious diners, glowing and shimmering in the daylight.

Views of Sarah Anne Johnson’s piece Best Beach from the Waterpark food court at 10 Bay Street

It is a huge photograph and it sweeps across the entire end of the food court’s massive plane of windows like some giant playground graffiti, messy, dripping, flourescent and joyful.

Best Beach by Sarah Anne Johnson

MOCCA – Part Picture

The exhibition at MOCCA, called Part Picture, is also associated with the Scotiabank CONTACT event. On entering the show there is a statement clarifying the curatorial rationale for the pieces included. The artists in this exhibition, declares the statement, must be:

young
reacting against digital photography, and,
combining photographs with another creative medium, like painting or sculpture

Why Jan Groover is included I do not know? She was born in 1943 and became well known in the 1970s for close up, vaguely feminist, domestic interiors. Maybe its because they are truly painterly and reminiscent of a Braque still life in purples, greens and reds? In any case I appreciated seeing these beautiful photos.

Untitled by Jan Groover

Painterly too are the photos by James Welling. It’s interesting that James Welling has worked for Brioni (the Italian fashion conglomerate) because these prints resemble nothing so much as pretty dress fabric.

14Y by James Welling

Works by Ryan Foerster are more in line with the stated intentions of the show and truly take photography into another realm. Eschewing the tradition of pristine craftsmanship in a dust free darkroom, Ryan Foerester uses mangled photo plates, chance and accidents of light, dirt and debris to create wonderfully expressionist pieces with a particular Petri-dish gore appeal that reads as post apocalyptic.

Artwork by Ryan Foerster

Ellen Carey’s Mourning Wall is composed of spent Polaroid plates. They have a dreary, grey, funerary look and are arranged in the finest tradition of minimalist sculpture. This piece made me think about the brief flowering of unique technologies. (How exciting Polaroid once was! Why did I throw my Commodore 64 in the trash?!) Ellen Carey extends the metaphor of obsolescence, death and decay with the Rust Belt aesthetic of this work.

Mourning Wall by Ellen Carey

Slick reams of photo paper tumble in heaps; snapshots sprout cables or have little blanket covers attached; but more typically, in this show, photographs take on a more painterly look, moving away from documentation, the traditional province of photography, and closer to objecthood, and marketability.

68 by Mariah Robertson