Who Knows (2014) is an installation comprising 12 pairs of colored neon phrases,
modeled on the declension of the verb “to know” which moves though a simple set of
variations and reversals. Like much of Etchells’s work Who Knows reveals a fascination
with rules and systems in language and in culture, especially in the way these structures
are both productive and constraining. The work’s repetition and recombination of
individual phrases — “I know,” “You know,” “We know,” “They know” — produces a
playful paranoia, nodding to the prescient topics of state and corporate surveillance,
snooping and data-harvesting. Who Knows was first shown at Contemporary Art Gallery,
Vancouver, as part of a collaboration with the PuSh Festival.