Jon Sasaki

Jon Sasaki, Sarah Milroy

"This catalogue accompanies the McMichael's exhibition Jon Sasaki: Homage. Each generation walks in the footsteps of the past while also finding ways to describe the world anew. In this series, Sasaki investigates cultures close to home. Jon Sasaki: Homage presents the full suite of Sasaki's large-format high-resolution photographs documenting bacterial cultures and fungus swabbed from archival objects in the holdings of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection--the paintbrushes, palettes and paint boxes once used by the original members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. The resulting eerily beautiful, landscape-like images reflect Sasaki's near-devotional attention to Canadian art history, and to the legacies of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. In this series, Sasaki expresses wry solidarity with the ghosts of Canadian art past, as seen through the lens of contemporary...