On View Through Jan. 5, 2025
Crossing the threshold into Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor, one is transported into a slightly nostalgic yet alien parallel realm, where simultaneous feelings of displacement and familiarity invite exploration. The path through the exhibition is linear, yet the unfolding narratives ebb and flow. Stories of technological innovation, rebellious acts, adaptation, and resiliency emerge. By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, consciousness and mind-altered states, Sunset Corridor provides a new lens through which to examine humanity’s ever-changing relationship to itself, its innovations, and its surroundings.
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe create architectural installations that physically and psychologically engage viewers in an expansive alternate universe. 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.
Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through January 5, 2025. Plan your visit to experience this immersive exhibition—it’s not one to be missed!
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is a leader in collecting, showing, and interpreting art from the 1940s to the present. Situated in the heart of the Cultural District, the creative center of the city, the Modern has been housed since 2002 in an elegant concrete, glass, and steel building designed by the renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. In addition to 53,000 square feet of soaring, light-filled gallery space and landscaped grounds with outdoor sculptures, the Museum features a reflecting pond, theater, education center, gift shop, and café, creating a thriving hub for our community and beyond.
For more information on the Modern, including gallery hours and admission prices, visit themodern.org or turn to page 13.
All images: Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor, 2024; Mixed media; Variable dimensions; ©Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe; Photographer: Evie Marie Bishop
