In her newest project, Mercury-Vapor, Chloe Brown investigates her obsession with anemoia, the feeling of nostalgia for a time you never existed in, through an exploration of Chinatown, streetlights, razor-wire, and urban mountaineering. Through long, solo walks under the cover of darkness, Brown, accompanied only by a camera, traverses environments familiar yet hostile, vivid yet hazy, insular yet welcoming. The resulting photographs, cropped to a theatrical aspect ratio, read like frames from a film that exists only in imagination. It’s no mistake, as the project is inspired heavily by the films of Wong Kar-Wa. The project is dominated by the ghastly green-blue haze of phantom mercury-vapor streetlamps, long-since retired but now resurrected through digital manipulation to return once-again to Chicago’s streets. Brown hopes, through this resuscitation, to share the affection that plagues her; the urge to visit a past that no longer exists. A gritty, unpolished, wholly lived-in city.

Brown’s wide-angle photographs with deep depth of field are designed to mimic the way humans experience their environments, seducing the viewer into their world, inviting the eye to wander throughout the frame and explore this pastiche of the past. Empty parking lots and expressways elicit the viewer to ask Where did everyone go? Am I even welcome here? Razor-wire lines fences and walls, while large writing screaming NO PARKING ANY TIME incites a world where even leaving your house might be a crime. Inspired by the short story The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury, Brown imagines a world and warns of a future where even walking through your city at night is grounds to be arrested for “regressive behavior.”

Mercury-Vapor endeavors to tempt the audience to explore another identity of Chinatown. A world not wholly comfortable, yet not completely hostile. A hazy, snowy, green-blue world that may be paradise, while it may be hell. However, it is one thing. Honest.