Message to Japan

Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time.

Artist information

Jon Sasaki utilizes primarily video, objects, performance, installation and interventions, producing work that mixes humor and pathos, usually with discomforting or gently antagonistic results. He is currently partway through a traveling solo exhibition entitled “Good Intentions” organized by the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the Kenderdine Art Gallery (University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, AB), MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie, ON), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, AB) and the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina SK). He has participated in group exhibitions at VOX (Montreal), The Vancouver Art Gallery, Simon Fraser University Gallery (Burnaby, BC), as well as the 2006 and 2008 editions of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. He holds a BFA from Mount Allison University, lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Message to Japan

We’re strangers to each other, but all these backpacks and these works bring us together. Sending you goodness, hope and inspiration,

Hanna Hur

Artist information

Hanna Hur (b. 1985) takes a phenomenological approach to investigating social constructions of identity formation, representation, and personal narrative. Her work has been published and exhibited across Canada and Berlin. Upcoming projects include exhibitions at XPACE, Galerie B-312, and YYZ Artist Outlet. She lives and works in Toronto.

Official Website: Hanna Hur

Message to Japan

Still surfaces doubling symmetrical reflections of calm
Clouds over water, hands touch, giving what you take
Growth patterns, the seasons, the minutes of the hour
Passions in pure colour and important points of happiness
Routines, expectations, assumptions: tomorrows
The everyday.

Unseen, unexpected, unprepared
Turbulence developed in an undercurrent
The earth actually shifted, water covered land, cities washed away
Listened for a wilding wind but it lay hushed, composed, conspiring
A thousand years of secret plans
Put in motion in a moment.

A single body gone and missing
Too vast, too impossible, too important
To chronicle and list the loss
The landscape strange, unrecognizable
The look-out, a shared summit of debris
But I am still alive and you are still alive.

And you are still alive and I am still alive.

Artist information

Dyan Marie is a visual artist exhibiting since 1980 working in sculpture and is an early innovator of digital-based photography. Dyan also responds to contemporary situations with poetry, community initiatives, publications, banner projects, public art, walking systems and festivals. She is a founder of C Magazine, Cold City Gallery, Walk Here, DIG IN, BIG: Bloor Improvement Group, Bloor Magazine and In Public. Dyan received the City Soul award from the Canadian Urban Institute and various art and community awards from city, provincial and federal government.

Official Website: Dyan Marie