Josh Kline

LAXART is pleased to present Adaptation, Josh Kline’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and the U.S. premier of his new, 16mm film, Adaptation (2019-2022). Presented alongside related photo-based works, sculpture, and installation, Adaptation continues the artist's Climate Change project (2019-ongoing), and is part of a larger cycle of installations concerned with the unfolding political, economic, technological, and biological changes that will shape life in the 21st Century.

Adaptation is a short, science-fiction film set in a near future New York City. The film depicts a waterlogged city submerged by the rising seas, utterly transformed by the traumatic consequences of today’s ruinous and irresponsible political and socioeconomic systems. In the wake of these transformations, day to day life carries on for a group of relief workers—essential workers—whose jobs bring them into this transmogrified future Manhattan. The film poses the question- who will clean up in the wake of catastrophe?

The works in this exhibition are part of the artist’s still in-progress project Climate Change, which he first exhibited at the gallery 47 Canal in New York in April 2019. Climate Change is the fourth chapter in Kline’s series of works that examine 21st Century reality, and it follows his projects Freedom (2015-16), Unemployment (2016), and Civil War (2017). These projects—and the many installations excerpted from them—have been exhibited widely, including in New York, Cleveland, Portland, and Washington D.C., London, Shanghai, Berlin, Oxford, and Turin.

This exhibition is curated by Catherine Taft. Support is provided by Horizon Art Foundation, the City of West Hollywood, and Chara Schreyer. The film is made possible in part by VIA Art Fund.