Freeman + Lowe: Sunset Corridor

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents a publication created for the exhibition: Freeman + 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 is the fourteenth and latest chapter in Freeman and Lowe’s series of expansive architectural installations. The exhibition continues the artists’ deep dive into their fictional San San Universe, a domain partially based on a mid-twentieth-century futurist theory put forth in Herman Kahn’s 1967 book The Year 2000. Kahn speculated that by the turn of the twenty-first century, San Diego and San Francisco would merge into one giant metropolis. Although this never came to pass, the theory is foundational to Freeman and Lowe’s creation: an adjacent world that parallels modern-day reality and examines, critiques, and illuminates our society’s relationships to technology, music, drugs, subcultures, and politics.

Sunset Corridor is the third installment within a recent subsection of San San to investigate The Smile, an information technology rampant within this universe. Comprised of five architectural zones and a video room, each space within Sunset Corridor tells a distinct story and supports a metanarrative about a transient youth culture. This fictional subculture takes over buildings owned by International Business Machine, better known as IBM, to hack The Smile’s technological framework and produce an underground music culture to subvert mainstream life. 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 and Lowe 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 across the world, including Scenario in the Shade at Museu MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal (2018), and permanent installations in an underground bunker in Ohio (A Cell In The Cloud, 2018) and Aros Aarhus Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark (Colony Howl, 2020). In 2022, the artists curated the site-specific exhibition Random Forest: A Reading Room for ISTANBUL’74. Freeman (b. 1975, Santa Fe, New Mexico) earned his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1997. Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, Ohio) earned his BA from Hampshire College in 2000, and his MFA from Columbia University in 2004.

Publisher: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2024
Dimensions: 10 x 9 x .25 inches
Softcover: 48 pages