Jason Baerg: Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees

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Jason Baerg, "Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees," 2021

installation view

Closing Reception: August 19 at 6:30 pm.

Join Jason for an artist talk, catalogue launch and refreshments.

The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to welcome Jason Baerg back home to host his mid-career retrospective. Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees charts 25 years of the artist’s work comprising installation, immersive projection and painting.

He writes, “I was born to be a Métis Artist. Raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, I was inspired by media and everything that was creative on-air!” While much of his recent work is conceived on the computer and produced by laser cutters, he thinks like a painter – it’s where he started as an artist. His ongoing allegiance to painting reverberates powerfully when he states: “Painting is a sacred bundle that echoes through ancestral time, carry it responsibly and make a meaningful contribution to it.”

Baerg’s work consistently evokes and challenges themes of community, ritual, Cree cosmology, Indigenous futurisms, and survivance – a term first employed by Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, to suggest the dynamic and creative endurance of Indigenous people, without the colonialist allusions to mere subsistence and  victimhood that survival may connote.