We are excited to announce that a new iteration of Sarah Anne Johnson’s (b. 1976; Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) “House on Fire” is currently on view at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Canada, through August 29.
Originally executed in 2009, House on Fire emerged as a long overdue response to fragmented records of a family trauma that the artist unearthed as a child. Among her most significant bodies of work, House on Fire epitomizes Johnson’s gift for translating intimate family history into a rich visual language.
The installation’s central subject is Johnson’s grandmother, Velma Orlikow, who in the 1950s underwent psychiatric experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, later revealed to be part of the CIA-funded MK-ULTRA program. Across sculpture and works on paper, Johnson illustrates this history through the lens of a dollhouse. Its rooms are staged as scenes of disorder, from flooded interiors to restraining straps and dreamlike distortions of domestic space, accompanied by reworked family photographs and archival clippings.
At the center of the installation are nine small bronze figures, cast at the scale of dolls but carrying the weight of something older and more totemic. They are not likenesses of Orlikow, but instead exist as material representations of different psychological states. Plug In ICA’s presentation includes four of the original bronzes.
In Explosion, the figure’s skull gives way to an explosion rendered in epoxy. This figure speaks to how the experiments left Johnson’s grandmother unable to regulate her emotions. In The Family Tree, the figure gnaws at one of the tree branches which extend from her arms, like hands, ultimately symbolic of Johnson’s own martyr-like effort to prevent future generations from inheriting this trauma. In this sense, the figure chews through the trauma’s legacy before it reaches the next generation.
In Squirrel Head, the figure wears a fabric squirrel mask, a detail tied directly to court transcripts from Orlikow that Johnson read as a child, which described how the LSD injections made her feel like a squirrel trapped in a cage. In Black Out, the figure’s head is covered by a cardboard box while paper tubes restrict her hands, referencing the sensory deprivation tactics used on Orlikow, where she and other patients were kept in total darkness with their hands sheathed so that they could not touch their own bodies, cutting off their senses in order to deliberately sever their ties to reality.
House on Fire is presented at Plug In ICA in Johnson’s hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, alongside new video work, including “The Kitchen” and “Dancing with the Doctor,” which extend the project’s inquiry into Orlikow’s story through the moving image, alongside the dollhouse, bronzes, and works on paper. Created following Johnson’s selection as the inaugural recipient of the Aimia Photography Prize in 2009, House on Fire was first exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where it was later acquired for their permanent collection.
