The Rooms, St John's Newfoundland
January 15, 2020 - June, 2020
During his research residency with The Rooms collections, Jon Sasaki examined photographs, lantern slides and glass plate negatives (an early format for capturing images) that commercial artists modified through painting, cutting and pasting. Their choices reflect how they believed this province's landscape, people and wildlife should look. By drawing attention to these changes, Sasaki shows that any image can be fabricated.
Killing One Bird With Half A Stone
Esker Foundation, Calgary Alberta
September 26 - December 5, 2020
Jon Sasaki's multidisciplinary practice delves into the potentially generative outcomes of failure and futility. Killing One Bird With Half A Stone centres around a selection of the artist's videos from the past decade that depict the artist as a solitary protagonist who persistently, sometimes recklessly, refuses to accept the obsolescence, failure, or inadequacy of everyday objects. In To Change a Lightbulb (2017), Sasaki resolutely maneuvers a burnt-out lightbulb in the hopes of reconnecting the broken filament and re-illuminating the bulb, if only fleetingly. In Motivation (2013), he shakes a pendant lamp with a frayed cord, which illuminates briefly - tantalizingly - if shaken just so, before inevitably disconnecting again. When faced with the task of scaling a wall in Ladder Stack (2009), he perches multiple step ladders on top of one another, before precariously climbing out of the camera's view, presumably stacking additional ladders ad infinitum.
