Sarah Anne Johnson: A Mountain and a Forest

About

Sarah Anne Johnson (b. 1976; Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) explores the natural world through sensation and perception, and centers depictions of these internal experiences in a multimedia record across varied series that span photography, video, and sculpture. In A Mountain and a Forest, Johnson continues to innovate on the approach of her ongoing series Woodland, in which the artist alters photographs of the wilderness through digital color, oil paint, metal leaf, and holographic tape, among other media. Through these invented hues and textures, Johnson translates her wonder at the landscape into the visual realm and creates artworks that capture more than what can be seen through the camera alone.

A Mountain and a Forest presents two new bodies of work by Johnson: Cedar Forest, a vibrant series that grows out of Woodland; and Mountain, which presents altered photographs of a remembered wilderness excursion in hand-sculpted frames. Together, these series locate humanity’s place within Johnson’s vision of the North American wilderness and pay homage to the splendor of Canada’s Western frontier.

In early 2020, Johnson created her Woodland series as a reaction to a collective sense of isolation and disconnection. Through this work, the artist sought a resonant source of joy in color and nature. In Cedar Forest, this practice moves geographically Westward from Johnson’s home region of Manitoba to the cedar forests of British Columbia. Johnson compounds her change in horizon with an expanded field of view, emphasizing stands of cedar trees over any one individual, which glow from within through an intensified use of color. This visual overgrowth nods to the connections that ground Johnson’s work — both between humans and the landscape, and in natural relationships that make up the ecosystem itself. In cedar forests, the oldest trees are known as “mother” trees, which communicate and share resources with the surrounding forest through a mycelium network. In Cedar Forest, the artist honors the potential of this non-human consciousness: the idea that there are unseen signals and intelligence between trees that exist underneath the sounds and sights of forests.

As the titular subjects of Cedar Forest, trees take center stage, and Johnson’s activations of their architectural forms give them an inviting, psychedelic energy. “Purple Stump (Cedar Forest)” (2025) is ringed by sunset tones, spangled with fragments of holographic tape; “Pink Secret (Cedar Forest)” (2025) draws the viewer towards a glade of neon radiance at its center. In many Cedar Forest works, Johnson locates the sun through the trees and digitally augments its rays, alluding to a euphoric enlightenment and the simple, yet profound pleasure of the outdoors.

This awe is counterpointed by sentimentality in the sculpturally-framed photographs that make up Johnson’s new series Mountain. Each work is comprised of images of the artist’s friends on a seven-day hiking, camping, and horseback riding expedition into the wilds of Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada. In creating the frame for each of these prints herself, Johnson brings together her sensibilities across media and envelops each memory in a textural portal of the artist’s design.

Johnson digitally manipulates the images in Mountain and traces forms across them in oil paint, changing spectrum between black-and-white and color. These shifts allude to time’s passage, and the works flit between past and present to share in the artist’s memories and their echoes. By Johnson’s hand, a sunbeam or figure will emerge, illuminated as the emotional core of the scene. Especially in greyscale, Johnson’s casual snapshots recall the work of figurehead twentieth-century photographers and environmental advocates, imbued with an off-the-cuff and affectionate air.

The grand and tender vistas in A Mountain and a Forest posit a journey towards the sublime, a narrative where Johnson’s practice acts as a motivation and a destination. The figures of Mountain journey ever-onwards, captured en route towards the salvation found in the forests of Cedar Forest. The images in Mountain were captured during a trip that took place before Johnson began her Woodland works, and their presentation alongside the growth of that series into Cedar Forest marks a full-circle step in the artist’s practice.