Photography: Tree Planting Tribes

 From Canadian Art magazine: Lorraine Gilbert Shaping the New Forest 1990 Detail Courtesy National Gallery of Canada

I know a lot of young tree planters, and therefore this photography exhibit instantly caught my eye.

Organized and toured by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa, “Global Nature” brings the work of photographers Sarah Anne Johnson and Lorraine Gilbert to the mountain town of Kamloops. The two artists (based in Winnipeg and Ottawa respectively) share an approach to photography that emphasizes the symbiotic, complicated and often precarious relationship between our natural environment and ourselves. Interestingly, both have also done major projects on tree planting and tree planter culture—a subject that’s likely to gain critical mass in Canada this fall with the release of Charlotte Gill’s much-anticipated memoir Eating Dirt.

Sarah Anne Johnson Nadine 2003 Courtesy Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography © Sarah Anne Johnson

Sarah Anne Johnson lives and works in Winnipeg where she was born in 1976. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba and completed her Graduate studies at the Yale School of Art in 2004. She is a photo-based artist who uses a variety of media in realizing her work. Her graduating exhibition, “Tree Planting” consisting of 64 colour photographs of various sizes depicting her experiences tree planting in Northern Manitoba, was purchased by The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum for their permanent collection. 

See the tree planting project purchased by the Guggenheim for their permanent collection, here.

See more of Johnson’s tree planting works at Stephen Bulger gallery, here.

See Johnson’s 2005 Tree Planting project combining straight photographs with photographs recording “tableaux” scenes she created with small sculptural figures set in a fabricated landscape