Every Building from A Defunct Liberty Village Factory, Rotated Vertically
Jon Sasaki

The Bentway sits almost directly across the road from what was once the John Inglis and Company factory, Canada’s prized jewel industrial powerhouse that built steamship engines, fermentation tanks for Molson’s brewery, industrial pumps, turbines, World War I and II armaments, and finally washing machines. When it closed in 1989, it represented a staggering loss of industrial capacity for the city and the country. The factory’s closure symbolized something bigger, namely the demarcation between downtown Toronto’s industrial and post-industrial eras.

The area that was once covered with John Inglis and Company factory buildings is now the residential neighbourhood of Liberty Village. While some of the original industrial buildings have been repurposed as residential or retail space, most have been torn down and replaced with glittering highrise towers.

Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Jon Sasaki reimagines the factory in its heyday, wherein each of the original buildings has been retraced and modelled in plan view and then rotated into a vertical position. Sasaki’s gesture evokes the dense and populous verticality that has transformed the Liberty Village neighbourhood, while also creating a gravestone-like memorial for the area’s past life.

Part of The Bentway’s Fall Art Exhibition If, What, But If?

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Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice brings performance, video, object, and installation into a framework where expectation and outcome never align, generating a simultaneous sense of pathos and levity. His work employs reason-based approaches reminiscent of conceptual art while investigating romantic subjects; in this juxtaposition, Sasaki creates humorous, self-exhaustive systems caught in cycles of trial and error. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, (Lethbridge, AB), and a 2015 performance project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.