Max Cleary, Alex Boeschenstein, and Jackson Baker Ryan

Caché

All new buildings are devoid of substantive histories. However, most aren’t as resistant to accumulating memory as the modern townhome. With a mixture of hope, irony, and apprehension, Caché explores the foreboding qualities of these homogenous urban fixtures.

April 6 - 27, 2017
Opening: Thursday, April 6

A fundamental trope of the horror genre is the haunted house: a vessel that embodies archives of history which periodically surface in the present. In some cases, the haunted house visibly reveals its nefarious past; in others, it hides repellant histories beneath opulence.

In contrast to the haunted house, modern townhomes have a foreboding quality derived from their hereditary amnesia—they have no history and whisper so monotonously that they fail to attract sharpened attention, in spite of their growing pervasiveness in our urban centers.

While all new residential buildings may be devoid of substantive histories, most aren’t as resistant to accumulating memory as the modern townhome. Nevertheless, these buildings do accrue experience. Every city structure is a character within an infinite collective narrative, and we project roles onto these characters according to our needs and desires. If the townhome’s capacity to whisper into this narrative is limited, or if it communicates on a frequency we are not tuned in to, then perhaps it is our responsibility to expand our vocabulary or to listen more attentively.

Caché is a collaborative project between Max Cleary, Jackson Baker Ryan, and Alex Boeschenstein. The resulting exhibition is a collection of experiments in a variety of media that explore new developments in urban space with a mixture of hope, irony, and apprehension.

About the Artists

Max Cleary uses photography, video, and sculpture to make works of visual fiction that allude to a space of perpetual incompleteness. Employing the visual and conceptual languages of image production and construction, he explores how and why our conventional experiences, environments, relationships, and understanding come to exist and function—quite literally how they are built. Cleary received a BFA in Photomedia from the University of Washington.

Jackson Baker Ryan is an architectural artist who works primarily in digital modeling, rendering, and collage. His practice is grounded in spatial design and focally driven by the curated experience. He pursued a B.Arch at the Architectural Association and Syracuse University and is currently transferring to the University of Washington to obtain a degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering.

Alex Boeschenstein is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in the traditions of drawing and printmaking, but has evolved to include video, digital collage, sculpture, 3D modeling, and installation. His process is characterized by an increasingly interwoven relationship between tactile and digital media. In both environments, Boeschenstein gravitates toward information visualizations and technical visual languages. He graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts.