Art, Psychedelia, and Rock & Roll Roam Free in a New Installation

Have you ever gone to open a familiar door, but instead of your bedroom or office behind it, you find an alternate universe, a different timezone, a completely unexpected place that suddenly makes you realize it’s been a dream the entire time? At Freeman/Lowe's newest immersive art collaboration with Jennifer Herrema at Red Bull Studios, every door and every turn in the two-floor labyrinth reveals a completely unexpected experience, jumbling time, space, and reality that is so different from the once modernly minimal event space in Chelsea, you can’t help pinching yourself to wake up. In Scenario in the Shade, a 30-minute film with a killer, star-studded soundtrack is brought to life in the installation, transporting the viewer into a fictional music and art festival that exists simultaneously during a psychedelic drug induced Cold War type paranoia of the past and a drug addled youth subculture of today, still full of apocalyptic fears.

Following installations at Marlborough gallery and one in Marfa, Texas which recreated a blown out meth lab in the desert, this physical world is pieced together by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s team in the deliberately dilapidated style they have become known for. Collecting rejected old furniture, grungy thrift store art and tchotchkes, out-of-date technology, and even old displays from a Duane Reade that was going out of business down the street, the materials have been meticulously put together to create a highly curated vision of destruction. One room resembles a ransacked pharmacy filled with old DVDs. Another looks like an arcade after a bomb. Follow a brightly lit stairway, mimicking a grow house concealing flourishing “agriculture” behind plastic, you’ll pass through a deconstructed port-o-potty and end up inside a vacant courtroom.

The elements might seem random, but watching the film, which is screened in loop in a plush room down a wood paneled maze, you’ll start to see clues from the installation that make the plot come together. You’ll recognize the paintings on the walls, though in person they seemed more crooked, and jars of ephemera from fictional characters, though the liquid inside seemed clearer on the screen. The objects and the set have been pulled from the movie, but everything seems dirtier, more destroyed, when you’re navigating through the scene yourself. It’s like they caught this world on camera right before the party, or tornado, came through and turned things upside-down.

“Time is out of joint here,” Lowe tells The Creators Project, and it’s apparent that the past blends in with the present both in the film, which pairs retro footage with crisp HD camerawork, and throughout the space. Around one corner you’ll find a blown out wall revealing hidden surveillance equipment on flat screen computers, while a hole in another will lead you to a sunken living room with thick shag carpet, a sudden shift into a swingers pad of the seventies. “During this era,” he says, referring to the time around the Cold War that was inspiration for the project, “there was some righteous science fiction happening. They were talking about this future, the future where we are now.”

The soundtrack to the film, which also plays throughout the rooms, helps blur the line between then and now. Made in collaboration with Herrema (of Black Bananas and Royal Trux fame), Freeman and Lowe brought in an all-star cast of musicians including Kurt Vile, Devendra Banhardt, Lizzi Bougatsos, members of Hot Chip and more, sounds range from psych rock to ambient vibes to spoken word poetry. “We were installing and the band was downstairs, Jennifer, and Kurt, and Lizzy and they were playing over themselves and the other contributors. It was like a slice of rock and roll heaven,” says Lowe. The soundtrack is as much a part of the story as the visuals, creating an atmosphere in each that is uniquely individual.

“I haven’t heard it until now,” Lowe says about the sound element of the installation. It wasn’t until the opening day, after a whirlwind of installing and an opening party the night before, that he could actually hear what the soundtrack felt like playing within the space. “I really like it without a lot of people,” he says, and the emptiness of the transformed space becomes apparent. These hidden rooms, filled with mementos of a fake time and place, hold only the traces of people that might have been there before and could potentially be there later. The result creates a dreamlike state for viewers, one that is between past and present, a waking life that is hard to replicate in reality. “It might be my own personality,” says Freeman, taking in the stillness before the show opens to the public and exists as an alternate reality and must-see destination on the New York art circuit for next few months, “but it’s oddly peaceful now.“

Scenario in the Shade is on view through December 6 at Red Bull Studios New York, 220 W 18th Street. Click here for more information.

Related:

I Spent the Night at an Anything-Goes Art Slumber Party

Young Artists Envision Karaoke Videos as Installation Art

What If Your Apartment Were an Art Installation?