A new exhibit at the Nanaimo Art Gallery plays with the classic team-building exercise, the trust fall, as it explores unexpected outcomes of trusting the artistic process.
The exhibit, simply titled Trust Fall, features origami objects folded based on remote instructions and artwork developed through psychic intervention.
Victoria-based artist Laura Gildner created her piece Lovechild by following a series of missed connections and playful translations, starting with an auction listing for Patrick Swayze’s molars.
“Intrigued by the cult of celebrity that would cause an extracted tooth to generate monetary value, Gildner attempted to bid on the tooth, and failed. This initial disappointment, however, led the artist to collaborate with a biotechnology lab, a Nanaimo-based psychic medium, a dental implant, and Swayze’s ghost to harness the power of celebrity culture,” noted a news release from the Nanaimo Art Gallery.
The artist will bring new installations to Trust Fall that embody her research. She will share another piece as part of the exhibit, titled Men, that started with an open call for anyone who identified as male to participate in an audition-like video. She did not give specific direction on how to act and let the participants take on their own persona for the camera.
Trust Fall also features Toronto-based artist Jon Sasaki who explores Nanaimo’s bathtub racing boats in a new piece that proposes an alternate design to the traditional western roll-top tub.
“Considering the robust Japanese-Canadian community here prior to the Second World War, Sasaki creates an artwork that proposes an alternate kind of tub or ofuro that may have been a popular racing design under different historical circumstances,” the news release added.
Misconstructions is a piece created by Sasaki and Baco Ohama in response to mix-ups of COVID-19 era miscommunication. They created an origami-making process to highlight the challenges of working together from afar.
“Over a four-week period we sent one another audio-only instructions to make origami forms. Of course, visual instructions would have been far more practical, but we were interested in the slippage between what was intended and what was understood. The results may not have been as intended, but they are delightful nevertheless,” Sasaki said in the news release.
Trust Fall will be at the Nanaimo Art Gallery from Feb. 1 until April 13.