Jon Sasaki: In The House Built By Those That Came Before Me

7 July 2016 TO 5 September 2016

Location

Art Gallery of Sudbury | Galerie d'art de Sudbury

251 rue John Street
Sudbury, ON
P3E 1P9

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Artists

Jon Sasaki

The Art Gallery of Sudbury presents In the House Built By Those That Came Before Me by Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Jon Sasaki. The Art Gallery of Sudbury presents In the House Built By Those That Came Before Me by Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Jon Sasaki.

Sasaki explains “In the House Built By Those That Came Before Me will present a site-specific installation that considers the history of the Bell Mansion, built in 1907 by lumber baron William Joseph Bell as his residence, and later repurposed as the Art Gallery of Sudbury.” During installation, a large evergreen tree will be harvested from a tree farm “and an attempt will be made to maneuver it up to the second-floor gallery space” explains Sasaki. “Assistants will flex the tree around corners, lopping off branches and portions of the trunk as necessary to allow it to pass through residentially-scaled doorways and staircases. Whatever remains by the time it reaches Gallery 2 will be put on display.” Sasaki will also produce video documentation to display “the absurd and laborious action.” Video documentation can be found here on Sasaki’s website. The exhibit will also include single tree images selected by Sasaki, from the Gallery’s permanent collection; “Examples of the landscape genre’s historic mission to present `unbridled nature’ in scaled-down form, edited, made manageable to fit within institutional parameters”.

The Art Gallery of Sudbury’s exhibition follows the work of the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (GNO) where Director Danielle Tremblay first introduced Sudbury to Sasaki in the exhibition From the Ground to the Sky and Back Again.  According to the GNO website “the artist presented two new interconnected works that consider the cyclical fortunes of Sudbury’s mining industries”. In the AGS show, Sasaki notes the “title In the House Built By Those That Came Before Me both refers to a tree transposed into a lumber baron’s home, as well as alluding to the challenges faced by contemporary Canadian artists working critically and affectionately within the landscape tradition”. An essay by Kenneth Hayes on both the AGS and GNO exhibitions can be found here. Sasaki holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB) and is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto. 

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