Step into another world with ‘Sunset Corridor’ at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Jagged edges of drywall and exposed puffs of pink insulation are the first visible clues that Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s “Sunset Corridor” is not your typical art exhibition.

The immersive six-room architectural installation and related film transport viewers into an alternate universe that juxtaposes industrial powers and consumerism with hippies, drop-outs and countercultural movements.

Longtime collaborators Freeman and Lowe cite “The Year 2000,” by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, as an inspiration for their ongoing series about the San San Universe. The 1967 book predicted that the beginning of the 21st century would see the merger of San Diego and San Francisco into one metropolis called San San.

“We’ve really been inspired by the post war, Cold War history of California that had all these disparate threads of things like biotech and aerospace, entertainment and counterculture religions, music, drugs, all these things are converging to set the tone for the late 20th century and into the 21st century,” Freeman said.

The exhibition presents interiors as sculpture, Freeman continued, with each space representing its own distinct narrative.Visitors enter through an abandoned office space complete with drop ceilings and fluorescent lights before eventually making their way to a room that many viewers refer to as a cathedral with benches, ceramic tile mosaics and mirrors that imitate a peaked skylight. The installation culminates with a cinema.

“What happens with the film and the installation is that you have this sort of uncanny experience of seeing what you’ve just gone through represented back to you,” Lowe said.

Instead of working out of their 2,000-square-foot Brooklyn studio, Freeman and Lowe built this project in a former IBM office in Kingston, New York.

Courtesy photo

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Jens Henrik Daugaard, San San International

“It looked kind of like ‘28 Days Later.’ It’s sort of like people just left,” Lowe said. “There was water damage. It was scary.”

“Yeah, it didn’t have a lot of charm,” Freeman added.

Marcheta Fornoff covers the arts for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.

This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.