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.