Sarah Anne Johnson greets me at back door to the building that houses her studio in the West Exchange. We climb the stairs, chatting about our weeks and the artist talk at the old Globe Cinema she plans to attend after our interview. We enter the studio, and Sarah shows me around. On one side, large photographs taken at music festivals hang over tables of paints and other supplies. On the other, Sarah’s constructed a large cave with the help of her assistant as a continuation of her project House on Fire. A large handmade dummy rests on a table off to the side. Sarah props him up and tells me she’s had a difficult time trying to source fake eye balls. The last ones she ordered were pricey and they still don’t look real enough.
Since 2008, Sarah has been making work about her grandmother, Velma Orlikow, who was one of Doctor Cameron’s patients in the MKUltra experiments during the mid-1950’s. As treatment for postnatal depression, Velma underwent electroshock therapy, injections of LSD, and medically-induced sleep. Later, it was discovered that the entire project had been covertly funded by the CIA, and was part of an ongoing investigation into methods of interrogation and torture.
House on Fire in 2009 was Sarah’s first body of work about her grandmother’s experiences. The show included family photographs, newspaper clippings, bronze figurines and a surreal dollhouse. Since then, Sarah’s been constructing life-size replicas of each room in the dollhouse, making video, and sometimes reconstructing and displaying the models in galleries, putting on live performances inside them. The first was Hospital Hallway in 2015, followed by The Kitchen in 2016. Now she’s working on The Cave, a reconstruction of a room in the centre of the House on Fire with no windows or doors, where two figures dance. One of Sarah’s current projects is shooting a video in the cave, where she plays her grandmother, dancing with the dummy whose eyeballs aren’t right yet.
Returning to the other side of the studio, away from the cave and tables strewn with limbs and partial constructions of human figures, feels instantly cheerier. The walls are a brilliant white and photographs beckon with colour. Sarah likes to joke that, “If someone didn’t know that this was all one artist, they’d think it was two separate artists that didn’t even like each other or respect each other’s work.”
We sit down in two comfortably worn second-hand chairs and begin talking more about Sarah’s projects.
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