Trust Fall

ArtistLaura Gildner and Jon Sasaki

InquiryHow can we play together?

Opening Reception  January 31, 2025 | 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Trust falls are common team building exercises wherein individuals fall backward and count on their peers to catch them. When translated to everyday encounters and communications, without a safety net, the act of trusting the process can have unexpected, yet generative, outcomes. From origami objects that are folded based on remote instructions, to artworks developed through psychic intervention, Trust Fall is an exhibition that celebrates the creative potential of mistakes and miscommunication.

For the artwork LOVECHILD, Victoria-based artist Laura Gildner follows a series of missed connections and playful translations, beginning with an auction listing for one of late actor 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. For Trust Fall, Gildner will develop a new installation that brings this embodied research to life in the Gallery. Gildner’s interest in celebrities continues in another project she is creating for this exhibition. A new video work features motion picture stunt people, but instead of relegating them to the role of the double, Gildner empowers these dynamic individuals to enact their own stories for the camera.

Toronto-based artist Jon Sasaki is also developing a new work that is linked to this region. Nanaimo’s famous bathtub racing boats have very specific rules regarding tub construction and shape. According to the Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society, they must take on the form of a 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.

Alternate design processes also factor into Misconstructions, the 2022 artwork Sasaki developed in collaboration with artist Baco Ohama. Created in response to the mixups associated with the COVID-19 era of virtual and long-distance communications, the artists developed a collaborative origami making process that highlighted the challenges of working together from afar. As Sasaki explains: “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.

Misunderstandings can also happen between artists and curators, and one of the elements of the exhibition became an artwork through a misunderstanding between Sasaki and Nanaimo Art Gallery Curator Jesse Birch. During a virtual studio visit in 2007, conducted over email, Birch mistook an image of a Flying V electric guitar resting on a different guitar’s case, for an artwork about belonging. It wasn’t an artwork at the time, but simply two misaligned objects in a busy artist’s studio. Seventeen years later and for the context of this exhibition, it has become one.

Playing with mistakes and misunderstandings, Trust Fall is the first exhibition through which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: How can we play together?