Justin Lowe & Jonah Freeman

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Bright White Underground (Profanity in the Sky), 2010, Custom pigments prints, courtsey of the artists and Country Club Los Angeles / Cincinnati

interview by JADE BERREAU 

JADE BERREAU— What’s your next project?
JUSTIN LOWE  — A performance piece that starts as a lecture and segues into a fashion show that turns into a rock show. We’re collaborating with Jennifer Herrema and her band, RTX, and probably with the fashion designers Rodarte.
JONAH FREEMAN — There are also plans to make a film from all the fictional characters and histories developed for the Bright White Underground project. It will be a kind of paranoid psychedelic odyssey using a science-fiction interpretation of the Cold War and its countercultures.

JADE BERREAU — How would you describe what you do?
JUSTIN LOWE— We make extensive multi-room environmental installations. They usually have to do with histories of counterculture and have the overarching themes of community, ritual, and psychosis.
JONAH FREEMAN — Or they’re about countercultures and their relations to industrial society. The works are essentially rooms that we present as sculptures. In most cases you get a kind of incongruous juxtaposition of use and social context — like putting a crystal meth lab next to an Upper East Side museum. We want the threshold of each room to be analogous to a cinematic cut.
JUSTIN LOWE — There are details in each environment that help articulate a greater narrative about how these spaces were used and who used them. So we end up having to fill up the rooms with a dense arsenal of content.

JADE BERREAU — This could involve anything from a stage photograph of a ritualistic uptown party to fake drug packaging to a fictional book cover. Over the years, as the project has evolved, it’s developed from a simple articulation of one type of environment into an almost exhaustive universe of parallel narratives. Each show seems to build upon itself. Now the shows involve fictional characters and groups that create a kind of bizarre tour of the second half of the 20th century.

Bright White Underground (Profanity in the Sky), 2010, Custom pigments prints, courtsey of the artists and Country Club Los Angeles / Cincinnati

JUSTIN LOWE— The work has become an archive of imagery and objects that are somewhat hard to identify exactly — whether they were found or made, for example. But each alludes to events that took place in the past.
JONAH FREEMAN — I think you could relate the experience of walking through the piece to that of being in a foreign country. There are familiar details but large parts are mysterious and opaque, as if you don’t understand their language.

JADE BERREAU — How did you two decide to work together?
JUSTIN LOWE — We were living together in Brooklyn in a big warehouse. Neither of us was gainfully employed. We were just hanging out and making collages together. Eventually a discussion started about making an installation combining a crystal meth lab and the abandoned kitchen of a hippie commune.
JONAH FREEMAN — We had both done environmental installations, so it seemed logical to combine forces. Ballroom Marfa asked us to submit a proposal for an installation and we gave them what seemed like a completely ridiculous idea, which became Hello Meth Lab in the Sun. We honestly did not think they would go for it. It was expensive and complicated and the center of the piece was about crystal meth — not exactly the most attractive subject for a nonprofit organization.
JUSTIN LOWE — But they were adventurous and surprisingly responsive. Though it did take them two years to make a decision. Some people really needed to be convinced. But this gave us a lot of time to develop the idea, which worked in our favor.
JONAH FREEMAN — That’s how it grew from being a sculpture of a

JADE BERREAU — What’s your next project?
JUSTIN LOWE — A performance piece that starts as a lecture and segues into a fashion show that turns into a rock show. We’re collaborating with Jennifer Herrema and her band, RTX, and probably with the fashion designers Rodarte.

Bright White Underground, 2010, inkjet print, courtsey of the artists and Country Club Los Angeles / Cincinnati

JONAH FREEMAN — There are also plans to make a film from all the fictional characters and histories developed for the Bright White Underground project. It will be a kind of paranoid psychedelic odyssey using a science-fiction interpretation of the Cold War and its countercultures.

JADE BERREAU — How would you describe what you do?
JUSTIN LOWE — We make extensive multi-room environmental installations. They usually have to do with histories of counterculture and have the overarching themes of community, ritual, and psychosis.
JONAH FREEMAN — Or they’re about countercultures and their relations to industrial society. The works are essentially rooms that we present as sculptures. In most cases you get a kind of incongruous juxtaposition of use and social context — like putting a crystal meth lab next to an Upper East Side museum. We want the threshold of each room to be analogous to a cinematic cut.
JUSTIN LOWE — There are details in each environment that help articulate a greater narrative about how these spaces were used and who used them. So we end up having to fill up the rooms with a dense arsenal of content.
JONAH FREEMAN — This could involve anything from a stage photograph of a ritualistic uptown party to fake drug packaging to a fictional book cover. Over the years, as the project has evolved, it’s developed from a simple articulation of one type of environment into an almost exhaustive universe of parallel narratives. Each show seems to build upon itself. Now the shows involve fictional characters and groups that create a kind of bizarre tour of the second half of the 20th century.
JUSTIN LOWE — The work has become an archive of imagery and objects that are somewhat hard to identify exactly — whether they were found or made, for example. But each alludes to events that took place in the past.
JONAH FREEMAN — I think you could relate the experience of walking through the piece to that of being in a foreign country. There are familiar details but large parts are mysterious and opaque, as if you don’t understand their language.

JADE BERREAU — How did you two decide to work together?
JUSTIN LOWE — We were living together in Brooklyn in a big warehouse. Neither of us was gainfully employed. We were just hanging out and making collages together. Eventually a discussion started about making an installation combining a crystal meth lab and the abandoned kitchen of a hippie commune.
JONAH FREEMAN — We had both done environmental installations, so it seemed logical to combine forces. Ballroom Marfa asked us to submit a proposal for an installation and we gave them what seemed like a completely ridiculous idea, which became Hello Meth Lab in the Sun. We honestly did not think they would go for it. It was expensive and complicated and the center of the piece was about crystal meth — not exactly the most attractive subject for a nonprofit organization.
JUSTIN LOWE — But they were adventurous and surprisingly responsive. Though it did take them two years to make a decision. Some people really needed to be convinced. But this gave us a lot of time to develop the idea, which worked in our favor.
JONAH FREEMAN — That’s how it grew from being a sculpture of a meth lab into a labyrinthine series of rooms that were more about modern alchemy and community rituals.