From the Ground to the Sky and Back Again

Residency : from May 20 to 27, 2016

Opening : Friday May 27 2016, at 5pm

Jon Sasaki’s performance and sculptural installation works create systems of extreme redundancy that ultimately annihilate themselves.

From the Ground to the Sky and Back Again presents two new interconnected works that consider the cyclical fortunes of Sudbury’s mining industries. In a large scale installation, a 250′ long air-filled smokestack rises from the floor, coils around the gallery space in a manner connoting a giant writhing snake or a heaving intestinal tract, before returning back to the floor and “closing the loop.” It is vulnerable, organic, menacing and unnatural all at once. A companion piece speculatively charts the course of a fragment of Sudbury nickel, from its extraction a century ago, through time, space and world conflict, until it is returned by the artist to its place of origin. The fragment, like the smokestack, follows a serpentine looped path back to its starting point, echoing the exhibition title and suggesting the possibility that their cycles could be repeated in perpetuity.