Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present Hospital Hallway, a performance by award-winning, Winnipeg-based artist Sarah Anne Johnson.

Performance schedule for Hospital Hallway:
Wednesday, March 30^th, 8pm
Thursday, March 31^st, 8pm
Friday, April 1^st, 8pm

Spaces for the performance are very limited and must be reserved by calling Plug In ICA during gallery hours: 1 (204) 942-1043.

Hospital Hallway is a continuation of themes explored in Johnson’s immersive installation House on Fire and performance Dancing with The Doctor, drawing on her grandmother’s experience as an unwitting participant in the infamous MK-ULTRA mind-controlling drug experiments of the 1950s ultimately linked to the CIA.

For this performance, the artist has designed an elaborate enclosed set that positions audiences above her, circling the stage like theatre-in-the-round. In the contained structure she will perform a riveting series of gestural movements forming an expressive dance sequence that is both physically grueling and emotionally charged.

In Hospital Hallway Johnson takes the role of her grandmother as a patient pushed into a nightmarish ‘treatment’. Under a mask, Johnson uses the sterile and claustrophobic clinical-like space of the stage to physically represent the psychological trauma of her grandmother’s experience, communicating a loss of control and self.

Hospital Hallway encompasses a larger video and installation project that was first presented earlier this year at the prestigious Sobey Art Awards in Halifax, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge and will be presented as part of the Images Festival 2016, Toronto.

Sarah Anne Johnson is known for her ambitious multi-disciplinary practice which encompasses photography, sculpture, painting, video and installation. Johnson received her BFA from the University of Manitoba (2002) and her MFA in Photography at Yale School of Art (2004).  Her early work, including Tree Planting (2005) and The Galapagos Project (2007), represents ways of thinking and performing utopia and the nature of communal experiences. Johnson’s seminal installation House On Fire began her investigation within her grandmother’s trauma as a victim of the CIA’s illegal MK-ULTRA experiments, an ongoing narrative thread within her practice. Within all of her work, Johnson exposes the subjective embedded within the documentary. In 2008, she was the inaugural winner of the prestigious Grange Prize for Contemporary Photography.  Her many solo and group exhibitions include Fondation Cartier, Paris; the Guggenheim, New York; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa among others. She is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, Julie Saul Gallery, New York, and Division Gallery, Montréal.

Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program, and we extend gratitude to The Winnipeg Foundation and all our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers.

For media inquiries please contact: Sarah Nesbitt at sarah@plugin.org or by phone at (204) 942-1043 ext. 27