Justin Serulneck: The Angeleno

TORUS is proud to present “The Angeleno,” a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Justin Serulneck. Deftly operating across video, sculpture, and photography, Serulneck’s works are informed by a rigorous research practice, articulating a nuanced analysis of the economic, ecological, structural, and political factors that render Los Angeles County a site of perpetual instability. Employing approaches ranging from the allegorical to the observational, the artist examines cycles of growth and destruction whose effects reverberate across the various social strata of the city’s population.

Throughout the Covid period, Los Angeles County has experienced enormous prosperity for landlords and homeowners. Processes of capital accumulation and concentration have led to Los Angeles’ emergence as a wealthier, more powerful city. Given, within processes which augment and concentrate value are embedded destabilizing subprocesses whose presence are largely felt across socioeconomic and environmental peripheries.

“The Angeleno” explores notions of fragility and precarity in Los Angeles County through the situating of contemplative artworks whose respective contents address fractured domesticity, persecution of the unhoused, LACMA’s multi-month demolition of four of its own architectures, and the rebuilding of luxury housing over previous burnt landscapes in post-Woolsey Fire Malibu. While considering Los Angeles County as a site of volatile insecurity, the artist offers a series of personal works exploring the risks of living in an environment of exacerbated value capture.

“The Angeleno” as concept suggests multitudinous subject-positions that may be occupied. In separate instances, an Angeleno can rebuild after a fire, become a visionary to reinvigorate the museum, enact terror upon the unhoused, become unhoused, be forced to destroy tents used for living, or be an artist attempting to navigate such unruly terrain.

Justin Serulneck holds an Interschool Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography & Media and Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA and has had residencies with Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, UK and at the Drake Arts Centre in Kokkola, FI. Serulneck also holds a Master of Information Systems in Public Policy and Management and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering with an additional major in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has exhibited in Los Angeles and internationally. His video work In the Name of the Public is in the permanent collection of LACMA. Serulneck is an arts educator and volunteered with unhoused activist organizations during Covid-19.