Bio

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist who explores many concurrent streams of inquiry that regularly intertwine in surprising ways. In recent years his Nikkei ancestry has been an area of research, and it has culminated in numerous projects that deal with the history of Japanese Canadians.

For a 2019 performance and exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery, he examined some of the difficulties his seafaring grandfather faced after being expelled from Sea Island BC and having to start anew in Ontario. Over the course of three recent residencies in Japan, Sasaki has made work that searches for both differences and similarities between Canada and the country his ancestors left a century ago. In a number of cases this has taken a collaborative form, working directly with Japanese artists to explore the common ground.

Jon’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at The Esker Foundation, (Calgary, AB); The Richmond Art Gallery; The Rooms (St. John’s Nfld); and the Art G allery 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); The Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts, (Tokyo) and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, ON). Sasaki holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB) and is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto.

A few related works on www.jonsasaki.com

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/we-first-need-a-boat-for-the-rising-tide-to-lift-us/

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/collaborative-automatic-origami/

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/under-the-kamejima-bridge/

http://www.jonsasaki.com/index.php/work/please-dont-take-this-1000-yen/

Artist Statement

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice brings performance, video, object and installation into a framework where expectation and outcome never align, generating a simultaneous sense of pathos and levity. His work employs reason-based approaches reminiscent of conceptual art while investigating romantic subjects; in this juxtaposition, Sasaki creates humorous, self-exhaustive systems caught in cycles of trial and error.