Have you heard of Lee-Roth Fog? It’s described as an atmospheric phenomenon first discovered in 1972, “known for the bizarre sounds it seemingly makes as it rolls and blankets the West Hollywood landscape.” Engineers helped artist Ryan Betschart isolate the sound and capture footage of the phenomenon, which you can experience at Tacoma Art Museum’s Haunted. The fog cascades in waves across a massive screen, gradually engulfing the wall. Then comes the sound: high-pitched, a touch mellifluous, and then as bloodcurdling as a banshee. Every half hour the fog rolls in for two minutes and 55 seconds before the screen cuts to black and a silent countdown begins.
An Example of Lee-Roth Fog, Isolated Under Laboratory Conditions is one of many pieces in Haunted that will linger after you leave. Which is fitting, since it’s an exhibit about memory. Specifically, Haunted explores hauntology, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993 and later popularized by Mark Fisher to describe a nostalgia for “lost futures.” It’s a distinctly postmodern, post-analog feeling that the present is terminally haunted by the past—aesthetics and ideologies endlessly recycled until our ability to imagine radically new futures has eroded altogether.
Philosophically, it’s a somewhat slippery concept, but its core is a feeling of loss, longing, and nostalgia for intangible and ineffable things. Another common thread is the technology in which these apparitions appear—particularly the moving image—where data is as unstable and protean as the memory of the mind, and ghosts are legible in digital and analog decay. In Haunted, these specters of memory come into focus through objects and video works by 13 local and international artists.
One feels it immediately upon entering: a nearly tangible barometric pressure drop while passing from the non-haunted, light-saturated museum halls into a very non-museum-like voracious darkness. The entrance is lined with a wall of venetian blinds next to a flickering cathode-ray tube television looping the opening credits—a succession of artist names glitching across the screen. Above, the exhibition title is spelled out in big neon letters, as though to welcome viewers to the ride. The gallery beyond opens into a cavernous space with 30-foot-high ceilings. Almost all the lights are out. Two large neon doors by Kelsey Fernkopf rinse the room in violet blue.
Like the fog, nothing here is quite solid.
“I’m kind of a spooky person,” curator Ellen Ito admits. “Anything eerie, I’ll run toward, feckless and delighted.” Ito has worked at the museum for over 15 years. She knows the space intimately, and she knows how to set the mood, which, despite the gravitas of the subject matter, is anything but morose. (If you suspected Betschart’s “fog” is a fabrication, and that the sound is actually the isolated vocals of an ecstatic David Lee Roth piercing the fog-machine-flooded void, you’re right. In Betschart’s work, the ghost of Dad Rock looms, as well as the failure to achieve collective enlightenment promised in the 1960s and 1970s.)
Like the fog, nothing here is quite solid. As the viewer’s eyes adjust to the darkness, Maryam Dehbozorgi’s Digital Garden Carpet materializes underfoot: a Persian carpet spun from light. Leaves, birds, and fragments of personal photographs from her childhood in Iran drift, converge, and dissolve into geometrical patterns sourced from images of Persian carpets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archive. The labyrinthine waltz is a masterpiece of a work. As visitors enter the exhibit, Ito waves them over. “You can walk on it,” she tells them.
“For me, cinema and video hold memory perfectly because they’re ephemeral,” says Ito. “Turn on the lights and the work vanishes. Like a ghost.” There are eight videos playing simultaneously in the show, most with sound, none using headphones—a feat in itself. Making viewers want to actually linger with time-based work presented another challenge. “We were trying to figure out how to signal that it’s okay to engage with video in a museum the same way they do on their phones or in their living rooms,” she explains. Instead of benches, there are vintage theater seats and pews. Screens made with layers of theatrical scrim wrapped around wood frames become porous light-catchers. Hung from the ceiling, projected images float throughout the space, their diffused glow pouring through.
The constant murmur of video and audio in the periphery creates a baseline spine-tingling ambience, while fragmented pieces of a (haunted) house are scattered throughout: doors, carpets, windows. Crystal Z Campbell’s Go-Rilla Means War is projected onto a second wall of venetian blinds. Made with found footage discovered on the floor of the abandoned Slave Theater in Brooklyn, the unusual imagery of the film serves as a backdrop for poetic ruminations on gentrification, narrated by Campbell.
A pocket theater with a single pew houses Martí Madaula Esquirol’s Tramuntana, a portrait of the wind, traceable only in the shadows cast by smoke and clouds rolling across the land. In another small room, Lynne Siefert’s ARK follows a cruise ship to the end of the world, where footage of late-capitalist decadence is interspersed with musings of passengers lost at sea.
Migration, loss, and memory are intertwined in Chantal Peñalosa Fong’s video, Fong, which traces her search for family members and culture that have been lost in the process of moving across borders and continents. Architectural ruin is a site of haunting in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Post-Military Cinema, where a former cinema located at the Roosevelt Roads US Naval Station in Puerto Rico has fallen into disrepair—the only image projected into the space is the sunlight filtering through overgrown forest, the only sound the droning from beehives nearby. In Joan Bennàssar’s ¡Futuro! A Dream from Before History (Wan Li, Taiwan), the camera drifts through the retrofuturistic wasteland of the Wanli UFO Village, an abandoned seaside resort on the north coast of Taiwan.
Throughout the work, memory, fiction, and reality blur. Yihan Shi’s Unphotographed Past departs from the moving image, but approaches the same disfiguration of memory by attempting to recreate scenes of childhood bedrooms and domestic spaces. Each portrait of a room is stitched together from multiple photos containing fragments of furniture and personal items—a keyboard on the couch, a clock, journals cluttering a bedside table. In another series by Shi, Water Moon, black-and-white photos of family gatherings are so out of focus that the image dissolves, dreamlike, just out of memory’s reach.
Tivon Rice’s Ghosts of Sewoon Sangga are photographs of decommissioned CCTV monitors found in Korean markets. A closer look at these seemingly unremarkable objects reveals a burned-in image barely visible on each of the screens, caused by years of surveilling the same place: a stairwell, a doorway, an alley. Mounted onto lightboxes, Rice’s glowing images read as neither photograph nor screen, but something in-between.
Doppelgängers are another kind of ghost in Haunted. Like Fernkopf’s twin neon doors—one in the center of the room, the other pressed against a wall. Dehbozorgi’s carpet is mirrored in Mary Ann Peters’s impossible monument (on my eyes and my head), a 9-by-12-foot rectangle on the floor filled with 300 pounds of pressed all-purpose flour. The only place in the exhibit where white light pools, the delicate, powdery surface has been imprinted with found objects to create lacy patterns that radiate from the center. Fragile as neon, Peters’s piece is a meditation on the uncelebrated commonplace, but also on the ritual of breaking bread, and ephemerality and precarity itself. Blow on it and it could scatter.
Tucked toward the end of the exhibit, Cam Smith’s Traces functions as both camera and screen, recording visitors without their knowledge—at first. The screen flashes with a procession of strangers who have passed by earlier in the day. After a short delay, your own image flashes by, added to the parade of ever-shifting, slowly decaying specters. As if to say: Our ghosts are everywhere, all at once; we unwittingly leave a digital trace wherever we go.
Hauntology feels more relevant today than when it was first named—the world stuck in a late-capitalist cul-de-sac of horror, where AI has replaced imagination and the future feels anything but bright. But Haunted isn’t a horror show. Rather, it offers a series of entry points to better understand memory as a very human tool, capable of shaping our relationship to past, present, and future. After all, for Fisher, hauntology was always political. The feeling of helpless stagnation is a trap. In exploring these ideas, Haunted suggests a counterpoint to mourning: There are still new futures to be remembered.