Doris Guo

The Jar

1.11-24.11

Saturdays and Sundays 13:00-15:00

The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always  wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and  stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable  with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might  experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly  useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I  wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.  They are single floor painted wood “ranch” style houses, with low ceilings surrounded  by tall trees (yes I consider trees part of a house). They were popular in the period after  WWII, likely because of their simplicity. These houses were the backdrop of my  adolescence in the suburbs of Bellevue, WA. I fancied them to be a perfect setting for  a horror movie that’s not yet been made, draped by the year-round overcast of the  region. Over the past decade or so, these houses have mostly disappeared in my  parent’s neighborhood, one or two a year replaced by multiple floor “modern”  mansions, built by a handful of developers. Prioritizing max square footage and grass  lawn over tree canopy. It is eerie to visit each year and see the progression of this  change, the unfurling tone-deafness of new wealth. T-mobile, Microsoft, Boeing,  Amazon, Starbucks and many large Tech companies are headquartered between  Seattle and Bellevue, where my parents live. These houses being built unsurprisingly  correlate to an increasing houseless population. There are no substantial renter  protection laws in Seattle, and certainly not Bellevue. The idealized ranch house horror  of my childhood slipped into a Scandinavian-inspired, clunky, “Parasite” adjacent  structure.