Jon Sasaki | Years From Now This Will Have Been A Perfect Day

Jon Sasaki
Years From Now This Will Have Been A Perfect Day
Toronto, Canada: Superframe, 2015
C-Print, 12 x 18"
Edition of 10 signed copies


For the Art Toronto fair last month, Superframe launched a series of artists' projects under the banner name Portrait and Landscape. The venture included works by Alex Bierk, Tammi Campbell, Lili Huston-Herterich and Jon Sasaki.

Sasaki took advantage of the framer's uv filtering anti-reflection plexiglass, protecting the bottom portion of the print from fading. The top is framed with regular plexi, which allows for some gradual fading.

"About 15 years ago I worked at a small framing store on Bloor. I don't remember much about the time I spent there, but I do recall a framed picture with samples of various glass overlaid, that was used to demonstrate their different properties. The waterlilies under the plain glass were faded, while the ones under the UV glass still looked vibrant. For this edition, I was interested in the editing process our minds engage in when storing memories, the way some aspects are preserved while others are allowed to fade. In this photograph, the menacing cloud will eventually disappear, leaving behind a serene but inaccurate record."

- Jon Sasaki

For more information, contact Superframe at framing@superframe.ca.

Sasaki finishes up a residency in Detroit this weekend with a screening, artist talk, multiple launch and performance at the Detroit MoCA. Details here.

Mitch Robertson | Pepsi Jesus

Mitch Robertson
Pepsi Jesus
Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 2003
8.5" x 2" x 2" each
Edition of 4 (six packs)


Pepsi Jesus consists of a six-pack of kitsch porcelain Jesus statuettes painted in the trademark Pepsi colours. The work refers to the Christmas struggle between Christ and Santa Clause and Coca-Cola's co-option of the latter. Father Christmas was often illustrated as wearing a variety of colours, until Coke remade him in their own image, as part of a 1922 advertising campaign promoting their drink as thirst-quenching year ‘round.

Mitch Robertson: Astronomy Degree opens tonight at Birch Contemporary. Press release below. For more information, visit the gallery website, here.




September 10–October 24, 2015
Opening reception Thursday September 10 from 6 to 8pm

“And like art, cartography reveals fragments of reality through a tissue of lies.” (1)

On June 15, 1936, A. Dean Lindsay ambitiously claimed ownership of all extraterrestrial objects, an outrageous claim nevertheless taken seriously enough that he received numerous purchase offers (2). Such a faith in the uncertain rewards of the unknown has recently been fuelled by advances in spaceflight technology and a progressively overcrowded planet. The consequential desire to exploit anything left anywhere rises to ludicrous proportions in Mitch Robertson’s 2015 exhibition titled Astronomy Degree. For instance, in Star Values (2015) Robertson alters prints of star charts by hand painting each included constellation to resemble zones seen on real estate maps signifying average house prices. He substitutes housing values for star values, which he determines according to the total magnitude, or brightness, of all the stars in each constellation.

Similarly, in Defined Space (2015), he builds real estate zones by connecting stars with lines to form triangular sections of outer space.  Then, in his sculpture series, Astronomy Degree (2015), he stresses how representations of astronomical phenomena - diagrams, star charts or other illustrations - are illusory. The absurdity of applying terrestrial real estate mapping to outer space and his misrepresentation of the cosmos parallels the absurdity of a capitalism so addicted to speculation, dominance, and colonization that it will even attempt to procure what it cannot acquire: the unknown and the infinite.

Text by Earl Miller, an excerpt from his essay Mitch Robertson: Astronomy Degree

(1) Evangelos Livieratos and Alexandra Koussoulakou, “Vermeer’s Maps: A New Digital Look in an Old Master’s Mirror,” e-Perimetron 1.2 (Spring 2006): 138.

(2) Virgiliu Pop, Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources Ownership, Vol. 2 (Houten: Springer B.V.: 2008), 2.

Portrait and Landscape

Portrait and Landscape is the name given by Mitch Robertson's framing company Superframe, to the (pre-existing) double-sided horizontal and vertical signs that hang out front of the store. Superframe invites two artists a year to present a new work in the outdoor space. The first was Vanessa Maltese, and the most recent (launched last week) is by Derek Sullivan.

Sullivan's project consists of four compositions made from books taken from his bookshelf, which have been scanned, layered, arranged, enlarged, obscured and flattened into new forms.

"The publishing of any book establishes a landscape as each copy seeds itself in the world. Each book finds a new home, a new reader, gets lined up on a shelf. Every bookshelf can also be read a portrait of-sorts of the person who assembled it: an individual imagined through the residue of their reading; an individual imagined in the gaps between."

Toronto openings

Goin' to Halifax tomorrow and will sadly miss the following exhibitions:

Things Change by Joy Walker, and Separate by Tom Koken at MKG127, which opens Saturday October 19th, from 2 to 5 pm. Visit the gallery site, here, for more information.

Micah Lexier: Old Drawings, New Sculptures at Birch Contemporary, which opens Thursday
October 17 from 5-8 pm. For more information visit the gallery site, here.

Artist Mitch Robertson's framing business Superframe is holding a reception for their new signage space, "Portrait & Landscape" at 100 Geary Avenue from 5 to 7 pm on Friday October 18th. The inaugural project is called band-aid, by Vanessa Maltese.

Mitch Robertson

Last week I finished a text for a forthcoming book on Mitch Robertson, and I was reminded of how strong his multiples are. Many of them play with the idea of the edition size, such as Twice as Big as the Last One (2002) and 100 Secrets for Sale (1998). The latter consists of 100 envelopes, each containing a handwritten secret, signed and numbered. The number in the edition dictates both the price (1/100 is a dollar, 100/100 is a hundred dollars) and indicates the level of intimacy. The purchaser also buys the copyright to the contents, allowing them to make the secret public, resell or publish it.

The work can be purchased here.