Cabin Pressure

Janiva Ellis Manuel Arturo Abreu Carlos Reyes Ser Castro Serpas Bea Fremderman Purvis Young

Curated by Quinn Harrelson

The year is 2017 and over the vast urban sprawl of Los Angeles, the world has just ended, like a cracked egg. Many are taking post-apocalyptic selfies with the remaining minutes of their batteries.

But here, the crust of the peopled desert springs open, and something else crawls out from the earth’s core. It is possibly just a sentient silence, and yet an oasis germinates. Here lives a swamp, a jungle, a digestive system flipped inside out, a white cube of humidity transported from Southern Florida to Southern California.

To what extent does a group of works construct an environment? an ecosystem?

To what extent are they truncated into mechanisms of the jungle? into a single human body?

Like crocodile tears are artificial tears, this is an artificial rainforest, a simulacrum of the swamp. Constructed to push mutability to limits. Here alchemy transmutes mud to matter and nothingness to mud.