Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe create architectural installations that physically and psychologically immerse 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.

Crossing the threshold into 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, in Sunset Corridor Freeman and Lowe provide a new lens through which to examine humanity’s ever-changing relationship to itself, its innovations, and its surroundings. 

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) 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.  

Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Sunset Corridor is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Assistant Curator Clare Milliken. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication. 
 

This exhibition is made possible in part by support from Scott Mueller.