“Tuning”  

Justin Cole finds himself caught between the plates of multiple tectonic historical processes underway, shifting back and forth between social adjustments and political recalibrations that began generations ago. His work is an act of measuring the distance between recent forgotten histories and shrouded future catastrophes, described and conjugated here in the future perfect tense. He attempts to bring disparate things into alignment, a poetic search for the elusive harmonic frequency in the civic space between citizens.

Cole yearns for the politically epic, in all its proportions, yet his practice is a meditation on the ethics of material, time, cost, and quality, and how one achieves maximum effect with minimal traces. He absorbs and digests the improvisational energy and spiritual sustenance of Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and hones in on a new amplitude that other narratives lack, with waveforms pulled and stretched out across the length of lifetimes. There are the strange anachronistic geometries being outlined in Cole’s video of a re-enactment of President Jimmy Carter’s address, a speech by a people’s president to his people, striking in its humility and simplicity, a noble naivete, woven quietly into the banality of scenes of a modern life being lived in a society lurching forward that has long shifted past his paradigm and his legacy. Cole’s work here is a rough index of the patterns in the white noise, bringing the fog of information into sharp, algorithmic focus. He makes inverted portraits of the actors in the hellish political theater of our own making, inhabiting the new visceral world of the Upside Down, a present-day Bizarro realm where wrong is right and right is wrong. But the portraits also read as a photographic negatives that have yet to be printed into their final form, a forthcoming registration of the judgement of history. He writes secret material allegories about the lifecycles, recirculations, and contortions of symbols and signs that have become our enraged political discourse, with each allegory beginning and ending in an open-ended inquiry into what the stakes are for us to tune in to the signal, and to tune out the noise. 

- York Chang