Homage

The Toronto Conceptual artist Jon Sasaki began his career in the mid-nineties as a landscape painter. As the years have gone by, his approach to art making has evolved to include an ever-widening array of media, but one constant remains: his near-devotional attentiveness to the Group of Seven and their legacy in Canadian art. In this project for the McMichael, Sasaki takes his devotion to almost comic excess—swabbing the palettes used by the Group members and Tom Thomson held in the McMichael collection and growing the resulting bacterial cultures in petri dishes for his eventual large-scale photography. The results are microbial landscapes in their own right, records of slow blooms of colour and texture that exalt the natural world at the microscopic level while honouring the ghosts of Canadian art history.

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist with a lifelong interest in the Canadian landscape genre, its history and its role in contemporary art practice. While formally training as a landscape painter (BFA Mount Allison University, 1996) he began his investigation into the mythologization of the Group of Seven, and the trope of the Romantic individual confronting nature. Today he continues this inquiry in video, photography, sculpture, performance and installation, exploring ways the landscape genre dovetails with broader questions around our national identity. Sasaki’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Richmond Art Gallery; The Rooms (St. John’s Nfld); the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, (Lethbridge, AB); and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Sasaki has participated in recent group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, (Seoul, South Korea); The Bentway, (Toronto); The Canadian Embassy in Japan (Tokyo); and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, ON). He is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery.

This exhibition was curated by Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator, McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

 
Organized By:

Exhibition Sponsors:
Richard and Donna Ivey

Image credit: Jon Sasaki, Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by F.H. Varley, 2020;