WOAW Gallery is pleased to present That Summer We All Saw Them, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Ronan Day-Lewis featuring a body of oil pastel works on canvas. Venturing further into his distinct vision of mythic Americana, Day-Lewis turns his attention to a group of disconnected youths from the early millennium, constructing a fragmentary narrative that probes the mysterious chasm between past and present. The exhibition will be on view from 2 - 30 October 2024. This will be the artist’s first solo showing in Hong Kong. 

The process leading to this body of work began serendipitously, with Day-Lewis stumbling across an Instagram account called “tvwishes” one night this winter. The images on the account’s grid had the strange quality – both familiar and alien, tangible and unreachable – of the recent past. A closer look at the captions, written by an anonymous admin, revealed that these images were sourced mainly from early-two-thousands Flickr posts. Scrolling down, one photograph was particularly arresting: a teenage boy floating belly up in a black void, head thrown back hedonistically, hair glittering in that distinctly violent early-digital camera flash that had, until this moment, been reserved in his mind for photos from his childhood. The photo, which had been taken on August 31, 2003 at 9:09pm, was captioned with a name, followed by “American life.”

He went to Flickr and found the album the photo came from. Picture by picture, he found himself parsing through the days of the photographer’s adolescence. He began to recognize the recurring faces of their close friends; their names; the rooms they frequented. Over the following weeks, Day-Lewis found his way to other strangers’ uploads from similar periods and other unspecified towns. Many

of the images seemed to possess a latent darkness under their ennui. He began to feel as though he was getting to the bottom of something hidden. He felt that he had seen these faces, these rooms, these clothes, these hallways before. Friend groups from different times and places, strangers to each other, converged. He started to think that all these people were photographed over a single summer. Day-Lewis began to tell himself stories; that they saw something no one else would ever believe; that they lost their minds together.

The first painting the artist made was of the boy on the trampoline. By layering his personal mythology onto the images, he has tied himself irrevocably to these people he will never meet, sublimating himself through the act of painting into the past lives of strangers.