Exhibition(s):

Mar. 28th (Opening):

American Wasteland / Our Hero, Balthazar.

Jet Le Parti / L.S. Toy + screening of: Our Hero, Balthazar.

RP.1 / Saturday 3.28.

Description:

The American interior has long operated through a logic of externalization, projecting its pathologies outward while the conditions producing them go unexamined. What circulates as culture, as image, or as national narrative is rarely an account of the wound. It is the management of its appearance. American Wasteland begins from the refusal of that management.

The exhibition stages a body of work concerned with the extreme saturation of image, identity, and institutional form. It asks what persists after that saturation reaches its breaking point. Jet Le Parti’s practice, developed under the Reign.925 project, is built from inside the condition it documents. Grounded in a poverty-class southern Americana and the structural life of literal, architectural, and institutional bases, Le Parti treats systemic fracture and proximity to violence not as abstractions but as biographical fact. The work operates in the register of residue: what the culture deposits in the physical body and the built environment. Formally, the Reign.925 pieces act as paint-print hybrids that fluctuate between painting and serialized process. They carry the physical evidence of direct mark, image transfer, and a controlled, almost clinical repetition. Here, figuration dissolves into noise, and the geopolitical tonality of a country abroad mirrors the internal logic of a single life at scale. Le Parti does not critique these failing systems from a removed distance; the work inhabits their logic and submits it to extreme formal pressure.

L.S. Toy’s curated works enter the exhibition from an adjacent position to act as a structural counterpoint. Where Le Parti moves outward from a saturated interior, Toy approaches from the macroscopic. The work extends the inquiry across a different set of materials and aestheticized financial instruments to map the western extension of the American project. Together, they track the same weather without resolving into illustration.

The exhibition takes place in direct temporal relation to the March 27, 2026, theatrical release of Our Hero, Balthazar , the directorial debut of Oscar Boyson. The film follows a wealthy teenager (Jaeden Martell) whose performative online pleas for gun control lead him to Texas to confront a troll (Asa Butterfield) he believes to be a mass shooter. This narrative shares the exact ground the exhibition has been cultivating independently. By tracking the collision of fake empathy, digital hyper-reality, and physical violence, the film reveals a protagonist and an antagonist who are both subjects formed inside collapsing institutional structures. The proximity between the gallery and the cinema is not promotional. It is structural: two practices arriving at the same cultural moment through different means, made more precisely legible by being held alongside one another.

This is the exhibition's formal proposition. It is not synthesis, illustration, or cross-platform programming. It is a question about what it means for visual work and cinematic work to occupy the same conditions, the same city, and the same month without subordinating one to the other. New York intensifies this question. The city has absorbed more of the country's contradictions than most and continues to generate the tension between cultural production and the conditions that produce it. The walk from the theater to the gallery is three minutes. The distance between the two rooms, conceptually, is narrower still.

American Wasteland marks a development in how RP.1 and Base 36 understand the exhibition as a format. It functions not as a discrete event sealed from its cultural context, but as a live operation within it. The exhibition is sustained over the full month, opened and closed in direct relation to the film's theatrical window, and oriented toward the long accumulation of record, discourse, and documented encounter that constitutes the real work of any serious exhibition.

Primary works and Reign.925 limited editions available through Sibyl.

For acquisitions: luka@base36.fm

For press: d@base36.org

Presented by RP.1 / Base 36 in collaboration with Picturehouse and WG Pictures.