Galerie Division is pleased to present Field Trip, a new exhibition by Winnipeg-based artist, Sarah Anne Johnson. The artist’s second exhibition with the gallery coincides with Hospital Hallway, a solo exhibition held at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG).
Sarah Anne Johnson’s retouched photographs uncover the sentient experiences her camera fails to capture. Scratching, cutting, painting and digitally retooling her images, Johnson evinces her presence behind the lens, shifting our focus from apparent scenes to her personal experience. These additive and reductive marks establish a second stratum of indexicality–additional imprints upon film. If a photograph’s physical tie to the site it portrays has traditionally established a truth claim, then Johnson’s manipulations undercut this supposed accuracy, exposing an essential failure by images to represent a definitive verity. Moving beyond the conventional objectivity of photography, Johnson turns inward, foregrounding a nuanced subjectivity through inventions that contain their own truth.
IMAGE CREDIT: Sarah Anne Johnson, ‘Field Trip’, 2015, Exhibition View.
