Asleep in the Forest is an enchantment. To gain access to this new installation by Sarah Anne Johnson the viewer first enters the country’s tallest office building, located in downtown Toronto, ascends in an elevator to one of the upper floors, approaches the Bank of Montreal’s Project Room, confronts a white panelled door, sees a handsomely crafted, shiny, round brass aperture, stoops a little to look through it and finds—a nocturnal forest. Not just a forest at night but one occupied by two sleeping figures, their faces illuminated by the glow from a small but sturdy fire of twigs and deadfall branches. Two men in dark business suits and white shirts, cuffs nicely shot, wearing dress shoes and loosened ties, are at rest. One sits up, on look-out duty perhaps, his elbow on his knee, his weary head supported by his hand. He is asleep. The other man lays on his side, also asleep, facing the fire, his head on a pillow case stuffed with bundles of bills which spill from its opening. There are countless stacks of twenties, fifties, and some hundred dollar bills. So many his elbow nestles some, so many a second pillow case at the feet of the seated sleeper has emptied part of its contents on the rough ground.

They are in a small forest enclosure. Slender tree trunks cluster around them. Well-painted canvas backdrops extend the forest on three sides creating a proscenium stage of apparently limitless depth. A night soundscape shifts from the cheery reassurances of a crackling fire and bird hoots and chirps to indeterminate rustlings and animal calls and howls. The men sleep on. But the viewer has questions.

In this wonderfully anomalous piece—a forest at the top of an office tower—Sarah Anne Johnson has, by intention, created a work filled with ambiguities. How are we to read what we see here, the ambiguities heightened by the impediments to direct viewing? Is this a parable about the greed that leads to its inevitable dead end? Are they victims of an economic predicament that has driven them to desperate actions? Are they, in their youthful innocence, ill-conceived restorers of some fiscal injustice? Have they succumbed to a Robin Hood syndrome and taken redistribution of wealth into their own hands? Are they a sleeping metaphor for the futility of a single-minded pursuit of wealth? Are these two men heroes or crooks? What will happen to them now? Who will prepare breakfast for this business-attired pair when they wake in the morning looking for their neighbourhood barista?

What is located on the other side of the panelled door is a small drama set in a three-dimensional space which we view monocularly, one eye closed, the other pressed against the brass access point—our only point of access. So while the artist asserts that Asleep in the Forest is an open-ended work in terms of the reader’s apprehension, it is still closely controlled by the aperture she has created. As a viewer you can come to whatever conclusions you draw from the scene before you but it is entirely on the artist’s terms that you see the work.

Reminding us that what we’re looking at is artful, is artifice and neither reality nor an exacting replica, Sarah Anne Johnson has added a magical distance, has inserted an impediment that obliges us to pause and acknowledge the space and time an art work establishes in its making. And again, the ambiguity of depth and distance. Where are the sleepers, where are we, watching them?

A door with a peep hole and a scene from nature, set with a figure or figures conjures Marcel Duchamp’s final great work, Étant donnés. Johnson cites Duchamp’s piece as a source for this work, in particular its aura as a sustained enigma. Additionally she refers to the elaborate dioramas presented in Natural History Museums, which filled her eyes and imagination as a child. Understandably so—for artists the diorama is an ideal conflation of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, of reality and illusion, of truth and story.

Our desire to gain access to, and comprehend a situation is amplified when we are confounded in our pursuit by impediments of any kind. With Asleep in the Forest the realization is additionally forestalled by the need to bend or stoop in order to centre our eye on the opening. Then there’s a certain intimacy in being a single viewer, one at a time, and close enough to feel the cold metal against our cheekbone. There’s some claustrophobia too in the proximity, and then the surprise at what is revealed. You’re looking into a space you can’t enter and you’re catching two figures in a situation they would prefer to conceal. You experience the guilty pleasure of a voyeur, and a theatre-goer, alone in the dark, watching.

— Meeka Walsh, Editor, Border Crossings