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One of the most famous and influential artists in Manitoba’s history is being put under the microscope for a new exhibit at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery.
Jon Sasaki’s I Contain Multitudes, presented in conjunction with the Flash Photographic Festival, can be seen as a responsorial exhibit to the works of Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald, the former director of the School of Art and member of the iconic Group of Seven.
Listen to Jon Sasaki's interview with Nolan Kehler here:
As many young Canadian artists are, Sasaki recalls how he was inspired as a young boy by Group of Seven paintings. “I think the impression that I was left with was that, you know, there was a pathway to being a visual artist in Canada,” he shared in an interview on Morning Light, noting that this pathway led him to study landscape painting at art school in New Brunswick.
Fast forward to 2025, and Sasaki found himself with an opportunity to get up close and personal with Fitzgerald, who held a loose association with the famous Canadian art collective. Although he admits Fitzgerald’s art was something of a blind spot for him at the outset, he quickly found himself drawn to one of Fitzgerald’s signature inspiration points.
“I was really struck by the way Fitzgerald had like this very idiosyncratic way of depicting trees,” Sasaki shares. “They looked to me – and I guess to some other art historians – like human bodies in a lot of cases. He would stylize limbs of trees to look almost like human limbs, and some of his tree studies looked like figure studies.”
The conflation between tree and human limbs inspired Sasaki’s work in I Contain Multitudes, which saw him examine the bodies of trees as if they were human bodies. Using surgical endoscopes, Sasaki examined the inside of trees and all of the life that they contain and captured the images that are on display in the exhibit.
“I spent a week in Winnipeg last winter just wandering around looking for trees that had no knots or holes in them and video documenting what was inside,” Sasaki explains.
By plumbing the depths of these trees, Sasaki thinks that viewers will be able to experience the desire of Lemoine – and by extension, the Group of Seven as a whole – to capture the natural beauty of Canada in a more detailed way. “There’s a part of me that does sort of think about trying to bring back into focus some of the things that were omitted from the original artworks,” he says, noting that the artistic renderings created by the Group of Seven don’t reflect all of the cultures that have experienced the Canadian wilderness since time immemorial.
Visitors can experience I Contain Multitudes at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery until April 26, and can learn more about it at the school’s website.