This week, Soccer Club Club welcomes Justin Lowe’s BLAZE to the space with an opening reception on December 4th, 2025. Justin elaborates:

Over the winter, I went on a collage spree using elements from what began as a very large package—actually, packages. I ended up with a pared-down grouping of images that felt deeply personal, oddly heavy and too iconic in some cases to ever use before. From this batch, I made collages which distilled a contained lexicon of imagery.

This work was developed in Woodstock NY, just down the street from the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony and not far from where Harry Smith and Philip Guston are buried, flanked by the Hudson River. Transcendental landscapes, Time -dysmorphia (Rip Van Winkle), Presence through absence (The Headless Horseman), flavor these diabolical, municipal mind-scapes—interpretations of tree branch removal, high-vis construction signs, one-lane flaggers—all punctuated by Bondo and Primer in various states of smudgery and instruction. RealTree / True Timber / Blaze Orange—the deer can’t see us, but we can see each other. The ubiquitous homogeneous spread of camo in public is the zebra at the forest’s edge—a concentric forest of symmetrical trees, where you can almost read the negative space between the leaves.

This exhibition consists of three roughly 4×6 ft silkscreened and glazed ceramics mounted to wood and grouted. An additional variation on the theme veers into an editioned batch of traditional ’70s-style black light posters. Inspired by the “Bitchin Bajas” poster I saw at Tubby’s in Kingston, NY, down the street from where the ceramics were fired.

Justin Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, Ohio) lives and works in New York. His practice spans immersive installation, collage, and sculptural media, often driven by speculative histories and countercultural iconography. A graduate of Columbia University (MFA, 2004) and Hampshire College (BA, 2000), Lowe’s early solo work emerged from a fascination with the architecture of cultural debris—repurposed fiction, psychedelia, DIY publishing, and what he has described as “the aesthetics of collapse.”

Lowe’s solo exhibitions have appeared at institutions and galleries internationally, including Helter Swelter at Oliver Kamm 5BE (2004), Werewolf Karaoke at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2010); Hair of the Dog at Pepin Moore Gallery, Los Angeles (2011); Freedom Time Is Here Little Kittens at Galerie Frédéric Giroux, Paris (2008); and The New War at Galleria Cesare Manzo, Rome (2010). His work has been included in group shows such as Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2005), The Pantagruel Syndrome at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and most recently in A Study in Form at James Fuentes Gallery, New York (2024), and R U STILL PAINTING??? with the FALCON Art Collective (2025).

In parallel to his solo practice, Lowe began a long-term collaboration with Jonah Freeman in 2007. Their first project, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, premiered at Ballroom Marfa in 2008 and set the tone for a series of ambitious, immersive installations blending architecture, science fiction, and imagined subcultures. Projects such as Black Acid Co-Op (Deitch Projects, 2009), Bright White Underground (Country Club 2010), Stray Light Grey (Marlborough Chelsea 2012) Shadow Pool (MOCA Los Angeles, 2011), and Scenario in the Shade (MAAT Lisbon, 2018) offered labyrinthine environments populated by fictional institutions, shadow economies, and dystopian detritus. Their collaboration has produced permanent installations including Artichoke Underground (2013, Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf), A Cell in the Smile (2018, in a decommissioned Ohio bunker), and Colony Howl (2022, AROS, Aarhus). In 2024, they debuted Sunset Corridor at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

While the collaborative work builds alternate realities at architectural scale, Lowe’s solo efforts continue to function at times within a more intimate but no less disorienting register—cutting across collage, publication, and material experimentation.

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Tags: Chicago, Hermosa, Justin Lowe, Justin Lowe: BLAZE, Soccer Club Club