Artist duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe toy with real-world history and culture to create fictional yet weirdly believable immersive environments. The first of these, 2008's Meth Lab in the Sun, transformed Ballroom Marfa, Texas, into a labyrinthine series of interconnecting rooms, variously hung with photographs, wallpapered with pornography, and scattered with chemistry equipment. Freeman and Lowe’s latest undertaking, Bright White Underground, is based on the fabricated narrative of Dr. Arthur Cook—a Hollywood psychiatrist whose biography was devised by the artists, loosely based on Timothy Leary and the CIA's clandestine experiments with LSD in the 1960s. Cook’s fictional timeline is interwoven with that of the installation’s site, a modernist living space in Los Angeles designed in 1934 by pioneering architect Rudolph Schindler for retail designer JJ Buck. “It took us about 60 seconds to figure out the Buck house was perfect,” says Freeman. He and Lowe were approached by gallerist Christian Strike, who leases the iconic building for the LA outpost of his gallery Country Club Projects. To begin the project, which will be open to the public from September 17, the artists re-staged a party out of Cook’s made-up past, with actors playing the “kooks”, as well as the doctor himself. The resulting madness—a preview of which we premiere today—was photographed and will be exhibited in the house, which has been filled with ephemera as if it had lain uninhabited since Dr. Cook conducted his psychedelic research. Visitors will be encouraged to walk through the space, uncovering layers of the house’s history, real and imagined.
Production Designer Sonja Kroop
Styling Laurie Trott @AtelierManagement.com
Make up Michelle Mungcal @AtelierManagement.com
Hair Pamela Neal
Additional Hair Ramsell Martinez
Wardrobe Assistant Stephanie Strate
Photo Assistants Graham Walzer and Theodore Boyer
Production Jhordan Dahl
Additional Production Help Peter Osgueda