Description:

American Wasteland: Jet Le Parti / L.S. Toy

Presented by RP.1 / Base 36 [March 28, 2026]

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, image, or 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 work concerned with image saturation, identity collapse, and the afterlife of institutional form, asking what persists once 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 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 abstraction, but as biographical fact. The work operates in the register of residue: what a culture deposits into the physical body and the built environment. Formally, the Reign.925 pieces function as paint-print hybrids—direct mark, image transfer, and controlled repetition held in tension until figuration dissolves into noise. The geopolitical tonality of a country abroad mirrors the internal logic of a single life at scale. Le Parti does not critique these systems from a removed position; rather, the work inhabits their logic and submits it to extreme formal pressure.

L.S. Toy enters from an adjacent position, providing a structural counterpoint. Where Le Parti moves outward from a saturated interior, Toy approaches from the macroscopic. Utilizing a different material register and aestheticized financial instruments, Toy maps the western extension of the American project. Together, they track the same weather without resolving into simple illustration.

Running parallel to the exhibition is the theatrical release of Our Hero, Balthazar, the directorial debut of Oscar Boyson, opening March 27, 2026. The film—following a wealthy teenager whose performative online advocacy for gun control leads him to Texas to confront a presumed mass shooter—arrives at the exact cultural coordinates American Wasteland navigates. Both the exhibition and the film interrogate fake empathy, digital hyper-reality, and the violence born from collapsing institutional structures, locating protagonists fully formed by the conditions they appear to oppose. While not officially packaged together, the two exist in genuine, unreduced conversation: distinct works occupying the same cultural moment through entirely different means, made more precisely legible by being acknowledged alongside one another.

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

Inquiries:

• Acquisitions:luka@base36.fm

• Press:d@base36.org