If you’re in London before the end of the year, you'll want to book your ticket to see ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees, a solo presentation of artworks by award-winning Canadian and Cree Métis artist Jason Baerg. On view at the Canada Gallery at Canada House in Trafalgar Square, it surveys the first 25 years of his practice through the care and consideration of painting.

The single white room of the Canada Gallery is the perfect setting for a select few gems of what Jason has contributed to Canadian culture for over two decades, and as a ticketed event, the calm within these walls is much-welcomed contrast from the newly busy streets outside.

My immediate impression upon seeing the artworks together was that gravity played with and between them, at once weighty and earthbound whilst reaching skyward in a desperate yearning. Kisci-Okima-Achak, for example, is a multiple of five laser-cut steel pieces adorned with vibrant blues and candied yellows, whose heavy bodies are sustained off the ground by a balancing act on thick steel nails. Yet despite their weighty materiality, their palette which was reminiscent of the heavens, their lightning-strike shapes, and their positioning suggests a lightness that ascends towards the cosmos.

Jason Baerg, Kisci-Okima-Achak, 2014. A multiple of five worksAcrylic on Laser Cut Steel.

I had the opportunity to speak with Jason a few days after seeing his show, during which he described this playfulness of gravity that I perceived to be a "dynamic potentiality", a purposeful and perhaps calculated method through which his art objects are conceived. The term describes the way the elements within his compositions interact, a concept in painting that he learned from artist Ray Robinson who taught him at Lambton College in Sarnia in 1994 and who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London prior to that.

Whilst Jason is known as a multimedia artist, painting and its varied techniques are found in all of his artworks, including his video works. “Everything's a digital intervention in drawing and painting,” he says. “I really apply all of the kind of foundational principles I learned in drawing and painting through all of my work. There's something very painterly about even my media pieces.” The influence of painting and drawing also reveals itself in Jason's fashion line, ᐊᔨᒪ / Ayimach, where colours make starred appearances on innovative silhouettes.

Beyond the scope of art theory, we spoke about the history of abstract art, and about the Western institutions that have continually misattributed credit much to the chagrin of Indigenous artists. Whereas the first instances of Western abstract art and its companion of esotericism found their way into Western culture relatively late, indigenous art has always been rooted in ritualistic and the spiritual. Drawing from this tradition, Jason's art emerges from regard of ceremony and honour. The yellows that wind their way throughout every work in the gallery hint at the sun which rises each morning in the East, a ceremony that begins each day.

Pictured, Left to right, British photographer Clancy Gebler Davies, Canada UK Foundation’s, Wanda Hamilton, artist Jason Baerg and Canadian soprano Sarah Parkin met in the days after the exhibit opening.

This notion of ceremony embedded within nature is continued with his current work as a PhD researcher at Monash University in their department of Art, Design and Architecture, where data, imaging and art are combined.

“I'm doing a PhD that intends to create a reciprocal space between the elements and the machine. I'm working with various partners to secure data sets associated with fire. The sun rises in the East and is associated with ceremony, where ceremony begins. That's also the sacred fire. I’m interested in the digital data sets associated with the elements, so for example what's happening on the surface of the sun electromagnetically, what's happening in our atmospheres through lightning and thunder, and what's happening at the core of the earth. Then we drive these digital data sets into machine learning, from which we're trying to create a conversation. The intention is to decentre human biases and to create a space for Mother Nature at the table in digital futurities. But within the language of visual arts, the outcomes are going to be all about abstraction and the land.”

With this fascinating research in the works, and with 25 years of developing his unique vision in contemporary art, Jason Baerg’s career is one to follow closely.

ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees is on at Canada Gallery until December 31, 2022. Presented in partnership with the Woodland Cultural Centre, the first iteration of this touring exhibition was introduced by Tom Hill, one of the forefathers of Indigenous curatorial practices. For its current iteration, a refined selection of artworks was chosen in accordance with the space by Jason Baerg and curators Patricia Deadman and Naomi Johnson. You can book a free ticket via Eventbrite, or find out more information on the Government of Canada’s website.

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