The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Artist plumbs personal past for latest exhibit

By: Morley Walker

Posted: 07/7/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Winnipeg art star Sarah Anne Johnson's new exhibition will have its official opening Wednesday evening at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.In House on Fire, Johnson explores the story of her maternal grandmother Val Orlikow's unwitting participation and mistreatment in a CIA research program in Montreal in the mid-1950s.

"I'm really excited and extremely nervous," Johnson said Monday in a phone interview.

"It's so different from anything I've done before. I'm proud of it."

The exhibition combines photographs, drawings and sculpture, and is an extension of her breakthrough exhibition in 2005, Tree Planting, which now resides in the permanent collection of New York's Guggenheim Museum.

According to the AGO, Canada's largest provincial art gallery, Johnson has augmented the show with drawings in pencil and paint, as well as nine small bronzes and a new sculptural work, a dollhouse, from which the exhibition takes its title.

"In her previous work, (Johnson's) focus was on public and environmental issues," said Michelle Jacques, the AGO's associate curator of contemporary art. "Now, with House on Fire, she's gotten personal, and her unique approach yields disarmingly affecting results."

House on Fire will be on view at the AGO through Aug. 23. It then move to New York's Julie Saul Gallery, where it will open Sept. 23.

The Winnipeg artist-run centre aceartinc. will exhibit the show beginning in late January 2010, Johnson says.

"The work is so still so new," said Johnson, who turned 33 on Sunday. "When I got to Toronto, I asked them to pop a few of the photographs out of the frames so I could work on them."

In the mid-1950s, a Montreal psychiatrist subjected several of his patients to CIA-sponsored mind-control experiments.

Orlikow, the wife of then-Winnipeg MP David Orlikow, who had sought help for postpartum depression, was one of these patients.

Nine patients eventually sued the U.S. government and, in 1988, settled out of court.

Johnson was 14 when her grandmother died in 1990, and that's where most of memories reside.

"I set out to explore what happens when, out of left field, a branch breaks on the family tree, and how that sorts itself out," she said.

"It's about my grandmother, my mother and me."

Johnson is not to be confused with Winnipeg multimedia artist Sarah Johnston, the wife and collaborator of prolific mural artist Charlie Johnston.

In 2008, Johnson won the inaugural $50,000 Grange Prize for photography.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 7, 2009 C3

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