Selected Work

Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ A Path or Gap Among the Trees

A Touring Survey of Artworks by Jason Baerg (1994-2021+)

Painting is a sacred bundle that echoes through ancestral time, carry it responsibly and make a meaningful contribution to it. 

The journey through twenty-five years of caring for drawing and painting have found innovative pathways through the conceptual and formal approaches of Cree Metis visual artist Jason Baerg. Grounded commitments to Drawing and Painting have been transformed, as time positioned an artistic practice into an expanding field of digital and material experimentation. As a first generation new media artist, Jason Baerg forged fearlessly towards unique ways to utilize emergent 2D, 3D, interactive, immersive and fabrication technologies. Conceptual themes of investigation have rigorously included: Community, Ritual, Urban Migration, Cree Cosmology, Native Relationality, Survivance, An Indigenized Anthropocene, Language Revitalization and Indigenous Futurisms. The dynamic ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees exhibition charts key contributions Jason Baerg has made in the first 25 years of his artistic practice, which includes: interactive immersive generative media projection pieces and laser cut painting installations; both of which are some of the first produced and presented anywhere in the world.

ᓭᓭᓯᐤ / Sêsêsiw / Yellow Legs

Through abstraction and interplay of form, pieces such as Ka semakamok kîkway ᑲ  ᓭᒪᑲᒧᐠ  ᑮᑲᐧᕀ / Projection (Morning Star) and Umpehdu weeunpe dooweh eyeh / He who paints the day (Thunderbird) present expansive three-dimensional forms as they hover across white walls. Meanwhile, works such as Pimohceskanas ᐱᒧᐦᒉᐢᑲᓇᐢ / Pathway and Ka Wâsekwahk ᑲ  ᐋᐧᓭᑲᐧᕁ / Sky Blue – sizeable figures in their own right – are grounded on the gallery floor, activating a connection between the earth and the artworks themselves.

This recent body of work first came to fruition by invitation from the artist-run centre Neutral Ground in Regina in 2019. The artworks were made while in conversation with two community leaders, Paulette and Marcella Poitras, Indigenous knowledge keepers and storytellers. During the exhibition’s iteration in Regina, Baerg notes:

“Lee Maracle, a Sto:lo author, describes Story as an entity that finds its Teller. Through this space of understanding, I welcome visits from the Indigenous ancient stewards of this place to participate in the collaboration of a new body of paintings and a new media projection. I open myself up to what has to be said and heard through this process in Skype and cell conversations with local Regina Indigenous people (who are also welcomed into this creation space) as the work is in production.”

As inspiration from Cree cosmology and Indigenous futurities animate the pieces, they become portals and guides to explore traditional knowledge, their viewers becoming participants in an experience of connection and exchange.

Oskâyi Askîy ᐅᐢᑳᔨ ᐊᐢᑮᕀ

ᐅᐢᑳᔨ ᐊᐢᑮᕀ, which is pronounced Oskâyi Askîy, and translates to The New World in the Cree language.

ᐅᐢᑳᔨ ᐊᐢᑮᕀ explores themes of human survivance, engaged by Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor as he writes about "the enunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry." ᐅᐢᑳᔨ ᐊᐢᑮᕀ carries survivance into reflective spaces of activation, as we now witness international artistic trends engulfing the apocalyptic as illustrated in numerous symposiums, including the 2015 Art+Climate = Change Festival, which occurred in Melbourne, Australia, highlighting the works of artists and scholars from around the world.

In Art in The Age of Asymmetry, Timothy Morton proposes, "that we have entered a new era of aesthetics, shaped by the current ecological emergency." ᐅᐢᑳᔨ ᐊᐢᑮᕀ is an abstract body of work that considers a disconnected rapport with the environment as a result of misdirected human desire. The Sky, Animals and Land are processed through technology and are translated as flesh, fauna and playful apparatus. As a working artistic practice based methodology, this process acts as an exploratory space to consider future solutions to the calamity at hand.

Asaimîna ᐊᓴᐃᒼ ᐄᓇ All Over Again, 2020

Asaimîna ᐊᓴᐃᒼ ᐄᓇ All Over Again, (2020) is a generative new media projection piece that negotiates abstract spaces and places through a multiplicity of circular notions to contemplate direction. Sensing, intuiting, or knowing comes from understanding and are dynamic concepts that describe the continuum of a sequence of embodied experiences.

Asaimîna ᐊᓴᐃᒼ ᐄᓇ All Over Again activates the local and cosmological to serve as a digital compass for our future. The reward for interactivity is that abstractions appear. Abstractions are landscape inspired which also include Cree syllabics that also reference place.

Audio interactivity triggers changes in the soundscape as the participant moves the cursor with the rolly ball to the north, where the sound of the wind occur. If the cursor is moved to the south, the sounds of waves break. If you move the cursor to the East where the sun rises, crackles of fire are summoned and if the cursor is moved to the west, sounds of tectonic plates rumble.

The central orb is comprised of four stacked transparent video channels, which are composites produced by the animated outcomes of experiments made by feeding images in AI software of Indigenous trees to the local area in Tkaronto, representing the dense forest that once lived here, with current images of this city.

Jason Baerg, Returning

Returning draws on two different bodies of work: Relations, begun during his residency in Winnipeg, and Nomadic Bounce, created as part of his residency through the school of art at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2012.

In Relations the combination of 13 circular paintings with a video projection is a fitting means for Baerg to explore Indigenous notions of time through the many prophecies echoing from different cultures, such as the Cree, Hopi, Mayan and Tibetan; as well as relationships we have with the Sun, the Moon, the Earth and ourselves.