Sarah Anne Johnson: A Mountain and a Forest – Between Vision and Reverie
As autumn descends upon Toronto, the Stephen Bulger Gallery unveils A Mountain and a Forest, a luminous exhibition by Sarah Anne Johnson. Known for her ability to merge photography, painting, and sculpture into a single, tactile language, Johnson continues her exploration of how the natural world intertwines with human perception. Her images, which begin as documentary records, evolve into meditations on how memory and imagination shape the act of seeing. The exhibition unfolds in two distinct bodies of work, Mountain and Cedar Forest, each forming a quiet dialogue with the other. Mountain looks outward, expansive and wind-swept, while Cedar Forest draws inward, into spaces of intimacy and stillness.
Sarah Anne Johnson, The Valley, 2025. From the series “Mountain” Printed in 2025. Pigment print on archival paper, 20 x 30 inches
In Mountain, Johnson returns to Jasper National Park, revisiting terrain that once shaped her own sense of wilderness. Her photographs capture riders in mid-journey, their figures absorbed into the vastness of sky and stone. The faces are turned away, not in detachment but in communion with the landscape that surrounds them. These images hold the poise of stillness within motion, as if time itself had paused for breath. Each photograph rests within a hand-painted frame, its tone and curvature extending the chromatic field of the image. The frames, far from mere borders, act as thresholds, ceremonial enclosures that preserve the intimacy of travel and transform each image into an altar of attention.
Sarah Anne Johnson, Crossing Over (Mountain), 2025. From the series “Mountain” Printed in 2025, pigment print on archival paper, 20 x 29 3/4 inches.
Mountain opens into the distance; Cedar Forest draws that distance inward. In these works, Johnson turns her gaze toward the dense cedar groves of British Columbia. Here, the forest radiates as light dissolves into colour with trunks humming with a faint, iridescent vibration. Johnson works directly onto the photographic surface, layering oil pigment, gold leaf, and translucent chroma until the images shimmer like breath suspended in air. The forest becomes both subject and sensation, a place where the boundary between touch and vision dissolves.
Sarah Anne Johnson, Dappled And Dapper, 2025. From the series “Cedar Forest” Printed in 2025. Pigment print on archival paper, 40 x 59 3/8 inches
Johnson’s practice has always sought to extend the photograph beyond its mechanical limits, transforming it into a living surface. Her images become translations of memory, gesture, and feeling. In her hands, the photograph becomes porous to experience: a site where light, pigment, and thought converge.
The dialogue between Mountain and Cedar Forest is one of rhythm and return. The ascent through open air finds its echo in the shelter of trees; each series completes the other, like two movements in a single composition. Through this dialogue, Johnson offers an understanding of nature not as something distant, but as an interior landscape, one that mirrors states of solitude, reflection, and recognition.
Sarah Anne Johnson, Orange Stump, 2025. From the series “Cedar Forest” Printed in 2025, pigment print on archival paper with oil paint mounted to Stonehenge on to Stonehenge on aluminum composite panel, 40 x 59 ¹¹⁄₁₆ inches
Her work retains an intimacy that resists spectacle. Her photographs, touched by paint and breath, remain grounded in the quiet gestures of care that define her practice.
Walking through the A Mountain and Forest feels like entering a space of suspended time. The expansiveness of Mountain gradually yields to the enveloping stillness of Cedar Forest. Gold leaf flickers beneath translucent layers; brushstrokes rest lightly upon photographic grain. Each image bears traces of the artist’s hand, as though the act of creation were a continuation of the light it depicts. The experience is a cumulative, slowly unfolding, where perception deepens into reflection, and reflection into reverence.
Sarah Anne Johnson, Deep Woods, 2025. From the series “Cedar Forest” Printed in 2025. Pigment print on archival paper, 58 x 87 inches
Ultimately, A Mountain and a Forest is a meditation on perception itself. Johnson invites viewers to consider how we inhabit the world through looking and how attention might become a form of devotion. Her work reminds us that to truly see is to enter into a relation with the land, memory, and self. In the stillness her photographs create, beauty emerges as recognition of the moment we realize that nature, like art, lives within us as much as we live within it.
Yehyun Lee
Images are courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
*Exhibition information: Sarah Anne Johnson, A Mountain and a Forest, September 13 – October 25, 2025, Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue – Sat 11am – 6pm.