In our current issue, FADER #62, we wrote a little piece about artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe's Black Acid Co-op, an expansion of their previous Meth Lab installations in Marfa and Miami that makes its debut at Deitch Projects in SoHo tonight. To create the burnt-to-a-crisp trailer home that is the centerpiece of the Deitch installation, Freeman and Lowe went to upstate New York and torched a trailer themselves, and we went along. Read about it in the issue OR read the artsy-fartsy gobbledy gook Deitch wrote about the exhibit after the jump.
Their new piece continues the themes of previous versions specifically that of alchemy in a modern context and community, ritual and psychosis.Black Acid Co-Op is the moniker for a counter-culture enclave embedded in the metropolis. In this incarnation, the artists shift the focus from the production of illegal drugs to sites of sub-cultural groups and how they are situated in the larger urban environment. The installation will expand on the notions relating to the connection between counter-culture and industrial society resulting in a spatial collage that extends itself into a vast architectural setting.
Despite the strong contrast of scenes, the entire installation will feel as if it is a unified system of spaces, interconnected and functioning together. Ducts, wires and tubes traverse rooms creating a semblance of an organism: architecture as body, electricity as capillaries, and volumes as organs. And the intended use of many of the sites will feel transformed or hybridized: factories have become homes, kitchens are used as drug labs, the radical chic living room is frozen in a museum, the high-rise is carved into makeshift maze to evade the law.