Biblical Women Show Pain and Suffering in Olivia Johnston’s New Photographs

OTTAWA CITIZEN
By Peter Simpson

"Susanna (Katelin)," from Olivia Johnston's Fallen, portraits of biblical women, at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa.

CANADA---Two years after the grand exhibition of Caravaggio paintings at the National Gallery, a particularly disturbing image still lingers. The scene, captured in two of the Caravaggio paintings, was of Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac. God commands the sacrifice and even though it doesn’t happen — an angel stops the blade before it gets to Isaac’s throat, once Abraham’s “fear” of God has been dramatically proven — I found it all to be incomprehensible. A father’s final duty is to protect his child above all, so how could Abraham slaughter his own son, even to prove himself to God? The disquiet of the scene, rendered so powerfully by Caravaggio, crept back this week while I looked at the photographs in Fallen, the exhibition by Olivia Johnston opening Friday at La Petite Mort Gallery. [link]