Jon Sasaki: Homage
Curated by Sarah Milroy | Organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection
February 27 to April 26, 2025
Homage is a suite of photographs depicting petri dishes with bloomed microbial cultures derived from swabs of the palettes and brushes used by members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, objects held in the archives of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. These works are monumental in scale yet they reveal microscopic detail, affirming a playful reverence towards the Group’s legacy while reframing the genre of landscape painting through the lens of photography. Through these glowing bacterial landscapes Sasaki has generated a new sublime, a counterpoint to the quotidian nature of what lies beneath. The artifacts from which the microscopic organisms were gathered are exhibited in dialogue with the photographs, presenting a poignant entanglement of past and present-day artists in the story of Canadian art.
This iteration of Homage will feature a new work, commissioned by the School of Art Gallery and derived from holdings in the FitzGerald Study Centre Collection.
Exhibition Sponsors: Richard and Donna Ivey
Supported by Contact Photography Festival
Presented in partnership with FLASH Photographic Festival
Jon Sasaki: I Contain Multitudes
Curated by Blair Fornwald | Commissioned by the School of Art Gallery
February 27 to April 26, 2025
The School of Art Gallery is pleased to present a commissioned body of work by artist Jon Sasaki, created in response to its extensive collection of artworks and artifacts by Group of Seven artist and former School of Art Director, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald.
Sasaki’s work interrogates the Canadian landscape painting tradition, the hagiographic value of the artist’s tools, and the creative potential that lies within institutional art collections. Inspired by FitzGerald’s delicate and strangely anthropomorphic renderings of trees, Sasaki has created a series of videos using a tiny endoscopic camera to probe inside the trees around FitzGerald’s former Winnipeg residence, on campus and in local parks, and in driftwood found on the beach near the Fitzgerald family cottage on Bowen Island, British Columbia. The miniature landscapes Sasaki finds and documents are intimate, unsettling, and surprising. I Contain Multitudes explores the many capacities and applications of the gaze--which can be used toward scientific or aesthetic ends, can abstract or clarify, and can romanticize or pathologize.
Presented in Partnership with FLASH Photographic Festival
Image: Jon Sasaki, I Contain Multitudes, 2024, endoscopic video, colour, sound. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.