FORT WORTH, TX.- The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor, a multi- room immersive installation by the artist duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, on view from October 4, 2024, through January 5, 2025.
Sunset Corridor, 2024, is the latest chapter in the artists’ deep dive into the San San Universe, their fictional, retrofuturistic domain. San San is partially based on a futurist theory put forth by Herman Kahn and Anthony Weiner in their book The Year 2000 (1967), which speculated that San Diego and San Francisco would merge into one giant metropolis by the turn of the twenty-first century. Although this prediction never came to pass, the theory is foundational to Freeman and Lowe’s creation: an adjacent world that parallels modern- day reality and illuminates our society’s relationships to technology, music, drugs, subcultures, and politics.
Comprised of six architectural zones and a cinema, each space within Sunset Corridor is rooted in a sprawling metanarrative about alternative information technologies, transient youth, and emergent countercultures. In this parallel world, an abandoned industrial park once owned by International Business Machine, better known as IBM, becomes the hub for an underground music scene. Enterprising youth harness IBM’s nascent biotech and convert the dormant structure into a building-sized musical instrument. The installation encapsulates the moment of hybridization when industrial innovations in communication are remixed into an unexpected vehicle for a counterculture. By layering an alternate reality with references to real countercultures, historical and imagined narratives, technological inventions, urbanism, and the music industry, Freeman and Lowe create works replete with opportunities for critical examination of modern society.
Freeman (b. 1975, Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, Ohio) began working collaboratively in 2007 and exhibited their first installation, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, at Ballroom Marfa in 2008. Since that time, their joint practice has led to numerous exhibitions and projects across the world, including Black Acid Co-op, Deitch Projects, NYC (2009), Shadow Pool, MOCA Los Angeles (2012), a good neighbour: 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017), Scenario in the Shade at Museu MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal (2018), and permanent installations Artichoke Underground (2013) at Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany, an underground bunker in Ohio (A Cell In The Smile, 2018), and Colony Howl (2022) at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2022, the artists created a free-standing planetarium (Nova Heat, 2022) for the Format Festival, sponsored by Crystal Bridges Museum and The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas. The artists live and work in New York.
The exhibition is curated by Assistant Curator Clare Milliken and is accompanied by a publication and artist- created limited-edition merchandise.
