To describe Sarah Lacey’s exhibit “The Mysterious Disappearance of Walt Thompson,” currently on display at Freefall Studios on Front Street in Cuyahoga Falls, the best expression would be art imitating life imitating art imitating another life. This idea may be confusing at first, especially when considering Oscar Wilde’s famous pronouncement that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Wilde did not live in a world with the internet though, where the amount of information and imitation from people makes it difficult to know what is actually real and what has been fabricated—especially when it’s as exciting a topic as a missing person
“This work is a documentation of the disappearance of someone very close to my family, Walt Thompson. He was like an uncle to me, a close family friend that we would visit every holiday season,” Lacey explains in the introduction to her exhibit. “I wanted to use my artistic platform to spread the word of his disappearance and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it.”
Laid out in maps, journals, newspaper clippings, and flight logs, Lacey tells the story of Thompson’s last days before his disappearance in 2015 after multiple flights, where he found himself becoming more regularly lightheaded, recording multiple instrument malfunctions that showed no diagnostic errors, repeatedly seeing bright green lights in the sky, and most of all, finding mysterious glowing green stones near a structure engraved with circular patterns—his last known location, as noted in his journal. Using these resources, Lacey is able to tell the story of Thompson and his family, as well as the strange occurrences related to the crash of his plane.
If this bizarre green lights and circular stone pattern seem more like a lost story line from Damon Linelof’s Lost than a missing person case that podcasts like My Favorite Murder or Crime Junkie might discuss, that’s because this story and its evidence are completely fabricated.
“Everything that you see [in the exhibit] is fake; the journals, the objects, the images and the narrative– all of it was made up by me. The people’s portraits were made by artificial intelligence,” Lacey reveals in a hidden video found by scanning one of several QR codes on the wall. To general audiences who are too intrigued by the evidence or unable to access the additional digital material during their visit, the show provides a perfect narrative to maintain the façade. Once past the first part of the hidden video, however, Lacey reveals her imaginative trickery, just as she did for her Honors Research Project at the University of Akron, a Northeast Ohio serial kidnapper story similar to the Ariel Castro case, entitled “The Richard Hansen Kidnappings.” “I fooled everyone in this way to raise everyone’s awareness to the fact that we live in a post-truth society and anything can be falsified or projected as true,” Lacey explained. “What is the truth? Where can you find the truth? And when you find it, how can you be sure it’s really the truth?”
In addition to Lacey’s work, Freefall Studios’ Spring Exhibition includes incredible geode art from Rym Berkhaies, as well as a collection of abstract pieces called “The Purging” from local artist Nikki Bartel. All three exhibits will be on display through May 15th.
To learn more about Sarah Lacey’s work, visit https://sarahplacey.com/. For information on Freefall Studios and other upcoming shows, visit https://freefallstudio.com/.
