Sarah Anne Johnson’s photographic series Arctic Wonderland, The Galapagos Project, and Tree Planting capture themes of utopia, the hopefulness and despair of a perfect world, and humans’ relationship with the environment. In her artist talk, Johnson will discuss these projects and conclude with a focus on Painted Leaves, a billboard commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery for the exhibition The Pen moves across the earth.
Oil paint has been hand applied to a chromogenic print of an understory of leaves in a temperate coniferous forest. The leaves are marked with decorative motifs, yet the image is an overture to humanity’s thoughtless imprint on the landscape. In the age of the Anthropocene, many of us are sensing, as Ivan Illich called it, “the shadows our future throws.” These shadows are profoundly shifting our perceptions and yet many of our behaviours seem little changed. Johnson’s disturbance of the surface of the photographic image attempts to find the shape of hope in the shadows.