Jon Sasaki: I Contain Multitudes

Curated by Blair Fornwald

Commissioned by the School of Art Gallery⁣⁣

⁣⁣

February 27 to April 26, 2025⁣⁣

Artist Talk: Thursday, February 27, 12:00–1:30 PM, 368 ARTlab⁣⁣

Reception: Thursday, February 27, 5:00–8:00 PM, School of Art Gallery

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, and the 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