Press Release

Hernando’s Hideaway is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, Yaron Michael Hakim: Prototipo. The exhibition is comprised of five drawings on nautical charts and the definitive sculpture from Hakim’s ongoing series titled “Prototipo.” The exhibition will also include a new, site-specific sculptural work made while in residence at Hernando’s Hideaway and displayed on the front lawn of the residence.

From 2012–2013 Hakim made 3 trips to an abandoned beachside resort hotel on the island of Contadora in Panama. At this site, Hakim made the notable discovery of a series of mysterious computer-aided design (CAD) prints of an unidentified structure with an unknown purpose. Following these plans, he built the object, decorating its surface with jade-hued tiles. Using the concept of a “prototype,” Hakim performs and develops a series of imagined histories and test cases. He offers a structure to which the viewer might ascribe their own meaning, thereby completing the invention or giving function to an otherwise unfamiliar thing. In the discovery of the CAD prints, Hakim found a rich point of departure for a body of work that examines the failure of the island’s economy, its modern day ruins, and an attempt to transform the past into a re-beginning.

In his text Desert Islands, theorist Giles Deleuze describes the psychological mindscape of deserted islands as containing the potential for transformation through the movement between past, present, and future. He terms this the élan or the impetus of the imagination to dream of deserted islands as a sacred place for both creation and destruction. Deleuze states, “an island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited…[it is] only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island.” In the making of his own imaginary mythology, Hakim sources the Colonialist past of the island by reimagining the potential for a collective future.