Blouin Division is pleased to present A Mountain and a Forest, a solo exhibition by Canadian artist Sarah Anne Johnson. Originally presented at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto, the exhibition is expanded here with new works shown for the first time.
The exhibition builds on concerns developed in Johnson’s ongoing Woodland series, presented here in 2021. In this body of work, the photographic medium is treated as a provisional structure rather than a fixed record. For the artist, the documentation of forested environments becomes the basis for material and digital intervention, through which the image is reworked into a more subjective register, one that aligns representation with lived perception rather than objective description.
A Mountain and a Forest is composed of two series, each offering a distinct yet complementary approach to landscape. Occupying the main space, Cedar Forest deploys images of trees across the gallery walls. Working directly on photographic prints, Johnson intervenes on their surfaces through painting, pigment, and other materials, building each image in successive layers. These gestures move the works beyond documentation into constructed surfaces where photographic image and painterly intervention coexist. The forest is approached as a site of layered perception rather than depiction, where depth, luminosity, and spatial coherence are continually shifting, and images remain in flux between observation and fabrication.
In a more intimate room at the back of the gallery, Mountain is presented in dialogue with a mural painted by the artist, echoing the landscapes depicted in the works and extending them into the architectural space. The series draws from a horseback journey through Jasper National Park, where experience unfolds in discontinuous moments rather than sustained narrative. These fragments are emphasized through framing and surface treatment, which underline their constructed nature, held between image and object.
Johnson’s works draw on ecological research on plant communication, Indigenous understandings of land, and the historical association between trees and sacred architecture. These references sit alongside her ongoing engagement with landscape as shaped through perception, material intervention, and lived experience rather than fixed representation. Image-making becomes a space where documentation and transformation coexist, and where environments are continually reworked through acts of seeing and making.
