Before entering the world of Black Acid Co-Op, a collaborative installation by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, I was asked by a young woman at the gallery’s reception desk to sign a release form.  Surprised by this unconventional request, I laughed and queried, half-joking—“In case something falls on me?”  She smiled, and quipped back, “Yes—or in case you fall on something.”   Though it seemed strange at the moment, this exchange now strikes me as appropriate foreshadowing for what I was to find after passing through the newly painted doorframe that issued me into darkness.  A labyrinthine maze of connected rooms, hallways, and nooks (though this last word, I fear, conjures an image improperly cozy for what I mean to describe), Black Acid Co-Op is the NYC-based pair’s third collaboration; it is an original demonstration of their continued interest in the existence of alternative and sub-cultural spaces in relation to the urban environments which surround them.

Having acknowledged that you enter at your own risk, you step inside.  What you encounter is certainly not recognizable as Deitch Projects; it smells of freshly painted wood, its concrete floor is littered with torn newspaper, it bathes you with light in the hue of  burnt-siena.  Set back into one wood-paneled wall, behind dust-stained, finger-streaked glass, sits a landscape—like a morbid Museum of Natural History diorama—of rotting cacti.  A desert scene?—you wonder out loud.  Perhaps at one point; for now, though, there is nothing but eerie, dry remains.  The rest of the room is empty, the walls bare, save one small canvas which hangs modestly next to the entrance: on it, a hazy background of colored spheres which bleed into one another—something like a nighttime city street viewed through a rain-splattered camera lens—bears a sketchy representation of some molecular composition.  Precisely what sort of space this haunting, deserted “foyer” is meant to emulate is unclear, and, growing uncomfortable, you look around for an exit.  There are three “doorways” leading out—all of them appear to have been created by hacking carelessly through the wall with a hatchet.  Take a deep breath before you choose your next move; what you will see only grows stranger. 

The room to your left reeks of psychosis: the blinding white walls are lined in glass shelving which displays a collection of faceless Styrofoam busts, their features obscured by a thick, sloppy coating of pale plaster.  Their skulls bear paint-smeared plastic wigs which cascade over their lifeless shoulders and their necks are dappled with chunky glue and a smattering of neon colored pebbles from a fish-tank floor.  You begin to sweat as you explore the room, treading on filthy, white carpet; your head swims as the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead radiate heat, their wires exposed and reaching towards you like serpents.  Through squinted eyes you notice a doorway; you step into a tinfoil-lined space the size of a closet, sans exit.   Your reflection gazes listlessly back at you, echoed in front of and behind you, surrounding you on all sides, reflections of reflections, ad infinitum.  You want to run, or to bang your head against something—you are certain that you are somehow in a straight jacket, in an asylum, in the Inferno.  There is nowhere to go but back  in to that maze of who-knows-what, back through that white room, and you dread it; it strikes you as a psychiatric-ward for the already deceased.

The architectural spaces you encounter as you continue to weave bravely through the rest of the massive, sprawling installation, whose rooms seem ceaselessly to give unto rooms, and more rooms, and rooms again, are not all so blaringly, so obviously psychotic.  They will unfold before you as you continue your journey like a “cinematic montage,” at times seemingly dissonant, at times seamless, but consistently unnerving, dark and dusty.  You will duck here, steer clear of that rusty, jutting metal, step over a collapsed threshold and through a refrigerator whose back has been removed; light fixtures dangle, paint peels from walls, crushed, leaking bottles of drain-O spit toxic tangles of tubes like umbilical cords which carry oozing alchemic concoctions in arches overhead, beaten couches expose sharp springs.  You will enter theatrical stages, each a depiction of a specific “social/historical environment,” one after the next, as if moving through the varying sets of a film studio.  You will experience the “clandestine drug-lab, the drop-out commune, the China-town bazaar…the pirate radio station,” all in rapid sequence, all without explanation or categorization.

The maze in its totality consists of a superficially disparate amalgamation of the spaces constructed and occupied by sub-cultural communities, their chambers, vessels, niches and hiding places.  By way of these seemingly un-connected habitats’  proximity and juxtaposition, though, “their distinctions of use and condition” are blurred, and they are united in their ambiguity, in the removal from the quotidian that they share.  They each boast evidence of decay and destruction, of transgression and sublimation, of neglect; the sensation of having witnessed something illicit, something knotted and dark, settles about your shoulders like dust as you finally burst free, out into sunlight and fresh air.  Black Acid Co-Op succeeds in forcing a reconsideration of the secretive, throbbing spaces which exist quietly behind and under the facades of places we know.  This challenge to what we understand as accepted and acceptable is the common thread that runs throughout the tangled mess of dark rooms of like a river of blood, and it unifies our experience of each separate unit as would a substance-induced haze.