Stephen Montoya
(From the left) artists Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman present "Sunset Corridor" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth from Oct. 4 – Jan. 5.
A fractured hole in an otherwise pristine wall on the second floor of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, acts as a portal to an alternate expansive universe filled with once thought of high-tech devices.
This in a nutshell is probably the best way to describe The Modern’s latest exhibition, titled “Sunset Corridor,” created and conceptualized by artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe.
On view from Oct. 4 – Jan. 5, this exhibition is the art duo’s latest dive into the San San Universe, which is partially based on a futurist theory put forth by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner in their book The Year 2000 (1967). In the book, these authors speculate that San Deigo and San Francisco would merge into one giant metropolis, which is the basis for the art direction in the six rooms that make up this exhibition.
Explanations set aside, these six spaces, which act as standalone mini exhibitions that create one epic journey, evoke a sense of nostalgia, wonder, and tech mania. Once in these spaces, art fans will experience a visceral overload, filled with collages of pop culture imagery and old-school technology. According to Freeman and Lowe, each room illuminates society’s relationships to technology, music, drugs, subcultures, and politics.
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“Both my parents were deep into the seventies counterculture,” Freeman, a Santa Fe, New Mexico native says. “They owned a health store, so that's where a lot of this comes in. And the corporate industrial aspect is like the air we breathe. It's everywhere [like] the material that we swim in. And so, this exhibit kind of navigates that.”
The six rooms themselves consist of Mycotecture (Night Nurse Safari), Macrobiotic Office (The Spider of Epireality), Random Forest (The Whisper in the Kitchen), Disco Creeps (Ultraviolet Buffet/ Garden of Laziness), Vapor(shade) (Psychic Driving), Agonist (A Slushy Beverage in the Margarine Sunset), with the final mini exhibit titled Cinema (Nova Heat) near the exit.
“This exhibition has actually taken over one of the galleries we reserve for our permanent collection,” exhibit curator Clare Milliken verified. “Both Freeman and Lowe have totally transformed this space using different flooring, textures, and narratives.”
Each space within “Sunset Corridor” is rooted in a metanarrative about alternative information technologies, transient youth, and emergent countercultures. This parallel universe takes place in an abandoned industrial park once owned by International Business Machine, better known as IBM. According to the exhibit’s narrative, this place becomes the hub for an underground music scene.
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The entire exhibit creates a building-sized musical instrument made by a counterculture of youth who found a way to harness IBM’s nascent biotech, according to the exhibit’s narrative.
And much like a Meow Wolf immersive experience, “Sunset Corridor” does a great job of taking guests to another realm filled with objects that remind us of our own reality, but still seem a bit off.
Freeman and Lowe’s use of light, along with ceramics, and natural oils, create either a bright space or a dark foreboding one for art fans to experience. The light contrasts in each room help create a division between the realms, which gives guests a chance to reinvest in each room’s theme.
Near the end of the exhibition is the Agonist room, which displays a series of black leather booths that surround a sanctuary-like space filled with jagged triangular shapes illuminated by inner lights. A jagged mosaic on the floor doubles this motif as well as a giant swath of shag carpet. This room really has an aura to it that is reverently unexplainable.
“What is important about our interest in science fiction is that it didn’t come out of a childhood fantasy world, but rather our interest in the 1960s- 70s counterculture and California ideology,” Freeman says. “What seemed like a revelatory discovery in 2008- 09 is that the drug and drop-out cultures of that era were directly connected to the computer and information technologies that were just beginning to change our world. At that time, I think everyone associated the counterculture with music and the free-love party scene, but there was this unreported other side that was becoming enormously consequential.”
Lowe says this is the basis for the art he and Freeman create.
“Beyond the conceptual apparatus at play, here is a production model that is constantly being rethought and adapted to new situations,” Lowe says. “When you create environments that have an intense residue of human presence it really begs the question: who were the people who occupied these rooms?”
