Exhibition print flyer

Childhood

Vancouver, Washington
Oct 17th, 2015

Artists
Ryan John Bush, Eli Coplan, Rose Dickson, Zack Dougherty, Mike Erspamer, Arthur Hitchcock, Yoon Hyup, Takahito Ire, Keenan Jay, Matt Jay, Maak Lab, A.R. Leaman, John Clayton Lee, Jack Mernin, Camille Rushanaedy, Paul Savovici, Spencer Staley, Nghien Tran

Audio
Sadar Bahar, Adrian Lai


View the exhibition documentation here.

We have to go back. When protagonist Jack Shephard yells this in the season three finale of Lost, he’s talking about the Island, but he might as well be talking about the past. In the famously incoherent TV show, what little understanding available came largely from flashbacks to the characters’ lives before the Island, with the most lucid moments often going back to their youth. These scenes of memory entwine seamlessly with the show’s present and collapse clear distinctions of time. The German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, reflecting on his childhood spent in Berlin, said: “Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience.” Memories warp chronologies. In a moment of remembrance, the divide between past and present is removed, and both times are simultaneously occupied. Most importantly, memory doesn’t affect just the past and the present. Eventually, the flashbacks in Lost become flash-forwards instead, and what were once visions of the past shift into visions of the future. The shared past/present moment of remembrance opens up a space of possibility for the future.
Hideout attempts to open such a space. Focusing on the theme of “Childhood,” the works included emphasize remembrance and youth. Without becoming overly nostalgic, art and music enter and repurpose spaces straight out of childhood: the family restaurant Pho Le and the Evergreen Dance Academy. Both spaces retain their functions, food is served, and the dance academy hosts DJs and a dance floor, and artwork is spread throughout. There’s plenty of reflection to be found, through remembrance, but also literally, as in projections bouncing off the facades of nearby markets, and in all white, mirror-like pigment prints. In these works evoking childhood, it’s not possible to keep one’s distance from the past. Rather, like Benjamin, we enter into a collapsed time, somewhere between past and present, and an ephemeral space, offering glimpses of what the future could be. We look back in order to move forward.


Text: Alec Recinos
Special thanks
Pho Le and Evergreen Dance Academy

Press
Obscura




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