Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata installed a fog machine as part of their exhibition Please Stand By; Stand By Me at Punch Gallery this past March. Graduates of the University of Washington Art Department’s inaugural honors program in 2009, Hashemi and Hirata, both students of photography, have been collaborating since they met four years ago. This past summer, the pair was invited to use a shed belonging to Eric Fredericksen (Western Bridge) and Betsey Brock (Henry Art Gallery), where they hosted appointment-only art installations/performances in the unconventional space. Previously, the two collaborated in a studio shared with other UW photographers, and, in 2008, they mounted their first collaborative exhibit, First Show, sited in Storage Room, a converted storage room/gallery space in the basement of the UW Art Building.

“I was in a frat,” Hashemi smiled, “and I did the lighting for parties, really as an excuse to buy lasers and fog machines and work with those. I was really drawn to these objects, these mediums for making parties or events happen.” He described these tools as building blocks for visual culture.

“We would do whatever we do in the world,” explained Hirata, “and use it in our art.”

“It was a prepackaged product,” Hashemi said of the fog machine that became an integral part of the Punch exhibit. “It’s a commodity that has an actual experience,” Hashemi continued, “as a product in this world.” During the exhibition, the compact, metal-skinned, one-foot square, black box sat in the center of the gallery’s unfinished cement floor. Its title: “Fog Machine To Be Activated at 9pm Tonight.” This off-the-shelf commercial object was something you’d see at a club, a branded entity: the American DJ fog machine.

“It has two states,” Hashemi explained, “During the day it acts as sort of a static thing. People would come in and they would be aware of the act that would happen a few hours later. They are standing in the space thinking of how it will look in the near future, as something they can come back to.” In its passive state, the fog machine served as an object for the imagination, a trigger for memory as well as an occupier of the future. The dormant black box told its own story by bringing up the issue of time and by suggesting an alternate reality.

That imagined future, formed from one’s experience with naturally occurring fog, wasn’t quite what the returning visitor would experience. Generally, fog involves movement; either the fog itself drifts, or you travel through it. Perhaps you’ve driven through a misty patch on an evening excursion. Maybe you experienced a brief wash of whiteness, and then it dissipated; you came out the other side, and your view of the road was returned to you.

But in Punch Gallery, the fog-soaked air was contained and lit. At the appointed time, the artists created a manufactured experiment in perception. The fog machine filled the gallery with billowing clouds of glycol-infused molecules. “We turned all the lights on in the space,” Hashemi explained. “It was completely white. It made the room feel brighter. You couldn’t see around you, only four or five feet in any direction.” The transition from switch-on to complete whiteout spanned a mere five minutes.

Like the artists, visitors experienced an open-eyed blindness. “We were interested in that optical quality of the space,” Hirata said, “and wanted to work with that.” During the monthlong exhibition, Hashemi and Hirata spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at Punch (every day the gallery was open), outfitted against the cold in full-body down suits, arranging and rearranging light sculptures in the window. The artists performed at 9 PM, when the darkness outside enhanced their light play; they slept inside their installation, as well. Long tubes of neon and swirls of incandescent light played in the fog and off each other in that artificially-filled space. In a very literal sense, the atmosphere of the gallery was pushed out and replaced by a false material, a material that gave false impressions.

When the room was completely fog-filled, Hashemi and Hirata would turn off the machine, and the gallery would become a silent, rectangular cloud. Every so often, the artists would open the gallery door and allow their manufactured weather system to escape. “Fog would barrel out of the doorway,” Hashemi explained. “It would be swept right out and go straight up.”

In addition to its disorienting visual effects, the fog possessed a sound and a smell — the sound of the machine’s pumping engine, accompanied by a chemical-laden scent — and it was not easy to breathe. The artists offered surgical masks to visitors and wore respirators themselves. (They say they’ve suffered no ill effects, though California regulates the Black Label brand “fog juice” as a potential carcinogen.)

Most notable was the fact that the machine-generated weather confounded the artists’ ability to get their physical bearings—the fog scrambled their spatial orientation. “Because of that limited visibility, it opened up the space,” Hirata said. “I would go around the gallery to get to something that was right next to me. It made the space feel really, really large.” A roomful of manufactured weather and perception was turned on its head.