On Feb. 27, the School of Art Gallery unveiled its latest exhibitions by Jon Sasaki, a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist. Homage features a microbial photo series created from artifacts of influential Canadian artists, while I Contain Multitudes shows Sasaki’s responses to works by Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, a former director of the school of art.
Sasaki holds a bachelor of fine arts from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, where he spent several years painting landscapes. Even though most of his current work is not done en plein air, he remains deeply inspired by nature and the Canadian landscape.
For Homage, Sasaki swabbed the art supplies of artists such as Arthur Lismer and inoculated the microbes onto petri dishes. The blooming microbial growths were then photographed as landscapes, representing Canadian art on the smallest scale.
“What you’re seeing now is photo documentation of how those petri dishes grew and they became kind of landscapes in and of themselves […] If you step back, some of them actually resemble a forest with trees, and, you know, others are just kind of these amazing ecosystems of all of these different moulds and funguses and bacteria,” he said.
“It actually becomes this sort of very beautiful model of coexistence, and I think that seems to have something to do with Canada, right? If we’re talking about, you know, nature as a way of talking about Canadian identity, I think this sort of idea of productive coexistence has something to do with that.”
The art supplies belonged to members of the Group of Seven, a collective of Canadian landscape painters from the early 20th century. Sasaki noted that by depicting scenes such as a solitary tree on a windswept island, the group produced stirring paintings of nature and solitude.
I Contain Multitudes also explores themes of nature. Sasaki created eight videos by inserting endoscopes inside the burls of trees near places where FitzGerald lived and worked, including on campus and near his residences in Winnipeg and British Columbia.
In his career, FitzGerald created many detailed studies of trees and seemed interested in drawing parallels between trees and the human body. As such, exploring the inner world of trees seemed like a logical step for Sasaki.
“If this practice is about looking at trees the way one would look at a human being, then why don’t we use the tools for examining a human body? The same tools that, say, a surgeon would use for examining inside a human body?” he said.
The videos, shown on monitors designed to resemble operating room screens, depict pulsating slimes and crawling insects inside trees — even in the depths of winter. I Contain Multitudes, cleverly titled after Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself, 51,” reminds viewers of the strange and complex microscopic world inside trees and our bodies.
Homage and I Contain Multitudes are on display at the School of Art Gallery from Feb. 27 to April 26. Visit umanitoba.ca/art/gallery and jonsasaki.com for more information on Sasaki’s work.
