The past did not exist. Not at all.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, NAUSEA

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
—Pink Floyd, SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND

Ron Jude’s emmett brings new life to a selection of his earliest work, made in the early 1980s in central Idaho. Enhanced by “special effects” filters and cheap telephoto lenses, the pictures range from hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, a recurring forest in changing seasons, midnight horror films on a TV set, and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from the artist’s past. Edited here nearly 30 years after its making, this somewhat accidental, experimental body of work acquires unexpected nuance and humor, and has the cohesive qualities of a dream—memories reorganized into a fictionalized narrative, imagery suffused with both an unsettling melancholy and the prismatic glow of youthful reverie. Related in concept and residing thematically between his two previous books—Alpine Star and Other Nature—emmett achieves an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.