Sarah Anne Johnson
Julie Saul Gallery
The first photograph encountered in “Arctic Wonderland,” Sarah Anne Johnson’s fourth exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery, portrays a man dressed in heavy-duty outdoor gear, the kind meant to withstand extreme weather conditions, in the midst of what appears to be a leap of triumph or sheer glee. Behind him, a vast, frozen landscape stretches into the distance, while in his hands is a banner—clearly added by Johnson in the studio—that reads ARTIC CIRCLE, as though he were a sports fan cheering on a team. Similarly, in Cheerleading Pyramid, 2011, a group of people pose in the titular arrangement while brightly colored confetti, which the artist applied in acrylic paint, falls around them. Although not the show’s most arresting scenes, these two images are oddly jarring. Considering that the protagonists are in the Arctic, they appear oddly blithe.
In the other images, which have variously been hand-cut, painted on, embossed, or altered in Photoshop, the tone is somehow more apropos: A man steps into the water on the shore of a bay, creating a rippling bubble that arcs outward into billowing contour lines; a group of hikers treks toward a mysterious black monolith on the horizon; a nimbus surrounds a sole figure, who is possibly taking a picture. In each of these, the immaterial appears to become tangible, as though the rules of physics behaved differently at the earth’s northern pole. Other works suggest civilization. Luminously translucent structures appear on distant mountains and islands, like a futuristic colony in this inhospitable land; and, in a long, gorgeous vista of icy ridges descending into water, with two (real) polar bears in the distance, the ocean appears to boil with color, an effect that manages to be both beautiful and reminiscent of oil slicks and garbage. By contrast, the real photographic evidence of human presence—the remains of a mining camp—is as startling a reminder of decay and obsolescence as the broken statue of Ozymandias in the desert.
As an inspiration for her series, Johnson cites geoengineering proposals—schemes to intentionally manipulate the natural environment to counteract global climate change. These “increasingly dubious theories,” as she puts it, have included, say, shooting reflective particles into the atmosphere to deflect solar radiation and, as Johnson herself mentions, blocking out the sun itself with giant shields. The results of these efforts will likely be dystopic, even if their aim is saving the earth, and Johnson suffuses her imagining of them with fear and awe. This ambivalence is not uncommon in works that face the consequences of human environmental impact. For example, in Chris Jordan’s photographic series “Intolerable Beauty,” 2003–2005, in which the sheer scale of consumption is both admired and condemned, beauty and destruction uneasily coexist. In the case of Johnson’s work, we become so accustomed to her bleak vision that a single image in which nothing is altered beggars belief.
Rage can break out in the strangest of ways, which brings us back to the silly cheerleading images. Such is the folly of trying to control a place as wild and inhospitable as the Arctic; at the end of the world at the end of the earth, you might as well dance.