Artist Statement 

Falsework, curated by Mitch Kenworthy, is a collaboration between artists Simon Grefiel and kiyoshi. Guided by an ethos of care, support, and reciprocity, these artists make work that privileges the act and process of making. Evidenced throughout their interdisciplinary practices are materials and techniques readily gleaned from the various trades and construction work they do to earn a living. For Simon and kiyoshi, artwork and the work around it are not discrete activities.

In this exhibition, kiyoshi shows a scaffold-like platform built out of two-by-fours and plywood that he has sawed, burned, and belt sanded into a wrought index of both time and labour. A utilitarian structure, it serves as a means to install artwork and a stage for a performance. A plywood wall, also built by kiyoshi, frames and supports a three channel video by Simon. Composed of footage shot while working on a predominantly Filipino crew doing maintenance and fabrication on yachts in North Vancouver, Simon documents the tedium, camaraderie, pleasure, and beauty of working, while reflecting on histories and dynamics of Filipino marine labour.

In grunt gallery’s media lab, the artists present an ode to the job-site break room. Provisional furniture, a TV, a casual display of artworks and texts by friends, family, co-workers, and collaborators creates a setting for rest and respite. Facilitating hangouts and conversations, this space emphasizes the relationships and community in which Simon and kiyoshi’s practices are invariably situated and sustained.

Acknowledgements

kiyoshi dedicates his work in this exhibition to Mikiko and Gordon

Special thanks to Kevin Romaniuk, Christian Vistan, Brian and Maxine Kenworthy, Mariko Whitley, Marika Vandekraats, Mona Lisa Ali, Aubin Soonhwan Kwon, Keenan Christiansen, Sof Pickstone, Morgan Holt, David Bourne and especially everyone at grunt gallery for the care and support with which you have held this exhibition.

Artist Biographies

Simon Grefiel

Simon Grefiel is an artist whose work engages with ancient and colonial histories and practices from Southeast Asia and around the Pacific. Working with sculpture, found objects, drawings, and plant life, his explorations of language, dreams, spirits, familial stories and speculative narratives propose new ways of experiencing the supernatural realm and material universe. Grefiel is a Waray-Waray speaker born and raised in Tacloban City, Philippines and currently lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His work has been exhibited and screened at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ground Floor Art Centre, and Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver, and Gallery TPW in Toronto, ON.

Visit Grefiel’s Instagram page here:
instagram.com/sa4iiii/

kiyoshi

kiyoshi is an artist living and working on the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, colonially known as Vancouver, British Columbia. His practice encompasses architecture, performance, woodworking, and writing. Community is central to his way of working and being, something he attributes to having spent his formative years growing up in cooperative housing.

Visit kiyoshi’s Instagram page here:
instagram.com/k._yo_sh.__ijiji/

Mitch Kenworthy

Mitch Kenworthy maintains a painting practice that is vested in the daily rhythms and processes of studio work, engaging in writing and more recently, curation as adjacent modes of inquiry into doing, making, and working. He has shared texts, shown paintings, and contributed in an organizational capacity to various artist-led projects and initiatives in and around so-called Vancouver, where he resides as an uninvited guest on the unceded and stolen lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.

Visit kiyoshi’s Instagram page here:
instagram.com/k._yo_sh.__ijiji/

Tactile Object (welcome station)

Note: a laminated PDF in gallery of this transcript is also available.

Tactile Objects:

2D Site Map

3D Dollhouse Gallery Map

Tactile Patterns: 

The following patterns are available as tactile objects within the welcome station:

• Logo: A logo in the style of an industrial brand which features the names of Mitch within a horizontal oval and Sai & Kiyoshi within a horizontal bar and the show’s title Falsework, created by artist Simon Grefiel

Creative Access Audio Tour

Coming soon – May 7th, 2025

Curatorial Essay

Falsework: Simon Grefiel & kiyoshi

by Mitch Kenworthy

Out of another rebar latticed pit emerges another homogenous glass and concrete building. I pass multiple construction sites on my way to work each day. I appreciate the daily progress of a thing being built; the itinerant liminality of a scaffold exoskeleton, the slender verticality of falsework columns supporting freshly poured layers of concrete slab, the bright white rectangle of a piece of Tyvek billowing in the wind like a sail. I prefer the under construction to the constructed. I prefer the means to the ends. Better to write about the working, and the way the work is done.

“I LOVE baseball!” So goes the refrain in a text kiyoshi wrote and presented as a public reading a few years ago. I can attest, as kiyoshi’s friend, roommate, and former studiomate, that he does indeed love baseball. Watching baseball, playing baseball, “the most pastoral sport,” kiyoshi declares. Over the years, he has filled me in on the finer points of the game, from oddball pitching techniques and bullpen tactics, to the proletarian ethos of careers spent bouncing around the minor leagues. Sitting in the dugout, kicking at grass in the outfield, the pleasure of swinging a real wood bat; located in kiyoshi’s love of baseball is an appreciation for rhythmic slowness and haptic beauty that maps aptly onto his expansive and embodied practice. 

I knew kiyoshi at first primarily as a performance-based artist. His pieces somatically engaged space and architecture in a manner plainly legible in his material work, where a performative spirit lingers in the emphasis that he puts on the act of doing and making. kiyoshi privileges process and is attuned to the attendant sensations and pleasures of working on things. He works slowly, whittling away in the studio, working on other things; gardening, fashioning furniture for his bedroom out of appropriated lumber, redesigning the interior of our apartment. These activities are all significant to his practice, a practice in which he not only responds to the conditions that he is situated in at a given time, but actively constructs them. 

kiyoshi is keenly sensitive to the spaces he inhabits. In the studio that we shared, he walled in his section with two-by-fours and plywood. I was struck by the fact that he didn’t make this space and then make work within it. Rather, the space was his work. During this period, kiyoshi spent most of his spare time at the studio—even surreptitiously living there—and his space reflected his needs and desires at a given point; closing in, opening up, summarily deconstructed, reconfigured, and rebuilt in what was a years-long pursuit of architecting a space. The back doors of this studio opened up into a well traversed alleyway in Vancouver’s Riley Park neighbourhood. kiyoshi preferred them ajar, using the exterior to do his messier woodwork (notably burning and belt sanding lumber that made up the walls of his space). I appreciated the generosity with which he engaged passersby, conversing with them about what he was up to, establishing relationships with regulars. This way of working was out of necessity, keeping sawdust and fumes away from his studiomates. But there was also a clear affinity for the social and public context. 

In the tools and materials that kiyoshi uses, necessity and affinity meet again. There is an economic frugality at play. He has the tools he uses because of the jobs that he works. Materials like lumber are often collected in the form of leftovers and offcuts and are then reused in multiple projects, becoming wrought indexes of his labour in the process. But there is also a familiar affection for these tools and materials, one born out of long hours working with them in various trades and construction jobs. Formative to kiyoshi are the years he spent working for his father’s contracting company doing renovations around Vancouver. Days spent in rooms and buildings in various stages of construction and demolition are alluded to in the bare and unfinished stance of his woodworked structures. 

In Falsework, kiyoshi shows a plywood wall and scaffold-like platform, respectively titled past future past and i love you as a thought. These works importantly also do work; the plywood wall supporting a series of monitors playing videos by Simon, and the scaffold-like platform functioning as a stage for a performance and a means to install notes, the Tuck Tape installation across the top windows of grunt gallery. Much of the lumber that kiyoshi used to construct these pieces formed the walls of his current studio space. Dismantled, brought to grunt gallery and constructed in situ, the works and the site of their production are effectively collapsed. 

Last summer, I attended a beer-league baseball game that kiyoshi was playing in. He wore a Ford branded trucker cap that he had tie-dyed with bleach in our bathtub, reflective red cycling sunglasses purchased on his way to a landscaping gig, and a pair of electric blue cleats with knee high socks. His stance at bat had the same singular flair as his outfit; acutely crouched while dramatically shifting his weight from foot to foot. Between innings, kiyoshi offered me a beer pulled out of a waxed cardboard produce box that he had fashioned into a front rack for his bicycle and adorned with Tuck Tape. Everything kiyoshi does is approached with a certain aesthetic flourish, an appreciation for the potentials of ruggedly utilitarian matter, and an ethos of care. I think about a quote by Jan Verwoert that kiyoshi shared with me in an epistolary exchange of writing from one of our previous projects, “and why do we often enough go to extremes to do the things we seek to do in the way we think they need to be done? Because we care.”

My first engagement with Simon’s practice was caring for his plants. Potted in vessels made out of delicately sautered stained glass, they were shown in Flying Kiss for Receiving Cheek, an exhibition in the window space of The Libby Leshgold Gallery, where I work. It was 2021 and we were in the midst of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions. Access to the gallery was limited and discouraged. The windowed exhibition space heated up like a greenhouse in the sun, and Simon’s plants withered without daily watering. A banana tree was particularly mal-affected. During this unstable and uncertain time, my days took on a rhythm based on biking down to the gallery every afternoon to ensure these plants were properly watered and cared for. To my great pleasure, by the close of the exhibition the banana tree was thriving and had even begun to sprout new fronds. 

Following this exhibition, the plants and stained glass vessels were shipped to the Vancouver Art Gallery, where they were included in that year’s Vancouver Special triennial. Concern over fluctuating relative humidity levels meant that staff at the VAG were stingy with watering, reportedly telling Simon it could impact their ability to one day borrow a Rembrandt. When I attended the exhibition, the banana tree was in a sadly withered state. It presented a very different read than one fecund and verdant; a victim of colonial museology, whose care ironically came second to borrowing a work by a painter ensconced in a Dutch Golden Age contingent on VOC exploitation of Austronesia.  

Last year, I visited Simon’s studio. Neatly organized in one of his workbench drawers were the pieces of stained glass from the vessels in which the banana tree and other plants were shown. He had taken them apart and was refashioning them into new work. The glass was stored along with the rest of his vast collection of materials: pieces of teak, tubes of silicone and marine caulking, dried plants, memorabilia from the Philippines, offcuts of wood and myriad other items. Like kiyoshi, Simon reworks the same materials into multiple pieces and projects, and readily gleans these materials from his various day jobs. The stained glass were offcuts collected while Simon worked as a studio assistant for artist Julian Hou. Other materials were collected as leftovers from his job at the docks in North Vancouver, where Simon was employed on a predominantly Filipino crew doing maintenance and fabrication on high end yachts. It was here that he shot much of the footage for his three channel video installation, Ceremony for Smoke and Mirrors.

Expanding on his propensity to collect and gather material, the videos in this installation are composed from a vast archive of digital material shot and saved on Simon’s phone. They are edited in a way that, to quote the artist, maintains “a social media vernacular.” Simon is active on social media. His instagram stories, which I understand as an extension of his practice and desire to create and communicate, showcase insights into the places and communities in which he is situated at a given time, time lapses of a day’s work, research into interconnected Austronesian pasts and presents, notes on the politico-ethno-linguistic significance of Filipino budots music, and scenes of raves and dance parties that for Simon are of course a form of research, too. They provide a well framed glimpse into whatever has piqued Simon’s nimble curiosity at a given time. Follow him to see what I mean: @sa4iiii. 

Shooting footage at his jobsite affects a reformatting of Simon’s wage labour into an extension of his artistic labour. It is a creative act, that along with dancing, day dreams, longings for home, and the fellowship and camaraderie of coworkers, is presented in Ceremony for Smoke and Mirrors as inevitably infiltrating and ornamenting the rote work of manual labour. For Simon, a Waray-Waray speaking Filipino working on yachts in North Vancouver, this piece is also a tender reflection on his connection to a long lineage of Filipino marine labourers; from Enrique of Malacca, to Ben Flores, to the local fishermen in Simon’s hometown of Tacloban City, to his coworkers on the docks of North Vancouver and the Filipinos employed on international freighters and cargo ships the world over, working in an industry where hierarchies are well stratified based on what author Leila Kahlili locates as “the global colour line running through wage and recruitment strategies.” Captains and officers regularly consist of white Europeans, while under their purview are crews most often made up of workers from the Global South. We all work for money, but some money is worth more than other money, some work pays more than other work, some bodies do work that other bodies do not. But see Simon’s videos: Who are the ones dancing budots on the decks of freighters as they traverse the world’s seas? While not an antidote to global economic disparities, it is an act that asserts—along with any creative gesture not in the service of producing surplus value for one’s employer while on the job—that the working body is still the worker’s body. 

When we conceived of this exhibition, Simon’s plan was to solely use footage shot at his North Vancouver jobsite. Due to an issue with permanent residency paperwork that has left him unable to return from a recent trip to SouthEast Asia, he finalized this piece from his sister’s home in the Philippines. Ever responsive to his site and circumstance, the final edit includes footage collected from his time on this trip, condensing and overlaying the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean that both separates and connects Tacloban City in the Philippines with the Salish Sea that laps against the docks of North Vancouver.