Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman

JL: We make extensive multi room environmental installations. They usually have to do with histories of counterculture and have the overarching themes of community, ritual, and psychosis.

JF: Or they're about countercultures and their relations to industrial society. The works are essentially rooms that we present as sculptures. In most cases you get a kind of incongruous juxtaposition of use and social context -- like putting a crystal meth lab next to an upper east side museum. We want the threshold of each room to be analagous to a cinematic cut.

JF: I think the body of work we've made over the past four years has taken a complex approach to mind alteration. Rather than taking a pro- or anti-drug stance, it seems to us like the need to alter consciousness is a central part of human life. This goes back to the hunter-gatherer societies in which taking psychedelic mushrooms or cacti was part of life. And, of course, fermented beverages are a part of almost all societies.

JL: We've been obsessed with the varieties of mind alteration, whether through New Age remedies or narcotics. People are constantly playing with their nervous systems. We've recently become interested in the pre-psychedelic era tests made by the US government that involved using hallucinogenic drugs as mind control agents.