Purple Magazine
— S/S 2011 issue 15

Justin Lowe & Jonah Freeman

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.

JADE BERREAU — In 2009, as I walked through your show, Black Acid Co-op, at Deitch Projects, I felt as if I was walking through someone’s mind during an acid trip or a psychotic episode.
JUSTIN LOWE — Our objective is to have the experience be reminis- cent of a feverish dream. I think it has a lot to do with the unex- pected transition from one room to another. One minute you’re in a Chinatown bazaar, the next you’re in a burned-out trailer.
JONAH FREEMAN — We try to set up situations that destabilize the viewer by heightening their senses, which could be similar to being on an acid trip. With each piece we play with the expectations of a given site. We ask ourselves what kind of subtly uncanny effect will ease the viewer into the rabbit-hole-like experience we want to create. You entered the show in Marfa, Texas through what could have been the lobby of a country doctor’s office. At Deitch Projets we tried to mimic the low-end store décor one sees on Canal Street and in Chinatown.
JUSTIN LOWE — Our most re- cent project, Bright White Under- ground, was a radical transformation of the R.M. Schindler house, a beautiful modern designer home that’s nestled in a quiet Hollywood neighborhood. We aged the en- tire interior as though it had been abandoned for decades. But the effect was only apparent once you were inside. From the street it looked completely normal.

JADE BERREAU — How much of these elaborate “scenes” is improvised?
JONAH FREEMAN — Because of budgetary concerns, they’re pretty structured. They have to be well planned or they can become exor- bitantly expensive.
JUSTIN LOWE — The process starts with a long list of objects and surface treatments. We either make or buy props and we alter objects according to the surface treatments we want for each room — the lighting, etc.
jonah freeman — But in order to get each space to feel like a room that’s been inhabited, at some point there’s always some improvisation.

JADE BERREAU — Do you have it all meticulously thought out?
JUSTIN LOWE — As much as possible. We really have to use our time wisely because almost the entire work is made on site.

JADE BERREAU — What’s your view of mind alteration?
JONAH FREEMAN — That’s a complicated question. I’m not sure I can answer that succinctly. I think the body of work we’ve made over the past four years has taken a complex approach to mind alteration. Rather than taking a pro or anti-drug stance, it seems to us like the need to alter consciousness is a central part of human life. This goes back to the hunter-gather societies in which taking psychedelic mushrooms or cacti was part of life. And, of course, fermented beverages are a part of almost all societies.
JUSTIN LOWE — I guess we’ve always been obsessed with the varieties of mind alteration, whether through New Age remedies or narcotics. People are constantly playing with their nervous sys- tems. We’ve recently become interested in the pre-psychedelic era tests made by the US government that involved using hallucinogenic drugs as mind control agents.

[Table of contents]

S/S 2011 issue 15

Table of contents

purple EDITO

purple NEWS

purple BEST of the SEASON

purple INTERVIEW

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple DOCUMENTS

purple BEAUTY

purple TRAVEL

purple NAKED

purple LOVE

purple NIGHT

purple SUMMER

purple VISUAL ESSAY

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