Jon Sasaki: Oh Hopeful Me
Jon Sasaki Ladder Climb 2006 Video still detail Courtesy Jessica Bradley Art + Projects
Toronto artist Jon Sasaki took the spotlight at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in 2008 with a night-long performance that featured mascot actors tiring themselves out with rah-rah antics as the night wore on. By early morning the roles within the open-air stadium were reversed, and it was the audience in the stands cheering on the exhausted mascots. In a body of work that adopts effort and failure as companion modes, Sasaki, who shows a selection of recent works in new exhibitions at Jessica Bradley and Doris McCarthy Gallery, strikes a chord in relation to the blinded-by-success art world of the past decade. He resurrects a version of the existential comedy that Buster Keaton once aimed at modernism and, with dry wit, redirects it at the fantasies of achievement that underpin media culture and contemporary art-making. In a related press release Sasaki acknowledges “a strong skepticism toward themes of development, transformation and emergence, whether applied to art practice itself or taken in a broader sense.” It’s that broader sense that takes an eloquent art of quiet dedication and makes it speak volumes for the dimmed perception but undiminished pulse of the human condition. (1450 Dundas St W/1265 Military Tr, Toronto ON)
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Jon Sasaki I Promise It Will Always Be This Way 2008 Video still Courtesy Jessica Bradley Art + Projects |
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Jon Sasaki Vacuum 2009 Video still Courtesy Jessica Bradley Art + Projects |
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