A Season in Hell Exhibition by Sean Pablo

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Sean Pablo, A Season in Hell

Held from June 29 to July 17, 2022
at 17 Allen Street Floor 2, nyc

Welcome to A Season in Hell by Sean Pablo, the first solo exhibition by the skater, musician and artist. The show is as much an immersive experience as a solo show of artworks: it is a transference of Sean’s life into the gallery space.

Born to an Irish father and El Salvadorian mother (high school sweethearts), Sean Pablo was raised in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was a natural skateboarder and gained sponsorship from Supreme, Converse and skater-owned label Fucking Awesome at the tender age of 16. Skating—and the travel required to shoot skating videos—took over his life. He missed so much of high school that his father, Brendan, decided to homeschool Sean for his Senior year. An artist himself, Brendan’s curriculum was culled from art books and his exhaustive personal collection of prison art (a portion of which is on view, strung lovingly together with safety pins). It was during this era of homeschooling that Sean was encouraged to get into an extracurricular, and he took the opportunity to begin his own clothing and skate label, Paradise nyc.

The Instagram account of the Paradise brand hits like frenetic, hallucinatory and beautiful episodes of a public access show or a closed-circuit creation. Its lo-fi aesthetic pairs with canny editing and beautiful players; the audience wants to be wherever Paradise is. Sean understands his brand as an extension of everything else he is interested in: making music, making art and skating. To this end, the current exhibition positions the brand centrally as part of the artist’s artwork. Videos made for the Paradise label play on loop inside the show. Even the title of the show itself is a reference to the forever unfolding ‘seasons’ of new pret-a-porter fashion we produce as a species.

With similar direct transcription, wall drawings around the main gallery space recreate those inside Sean’s home. These drawings are mostly text-based and also taken from Sean’s father’s prison art collection, offering pat but cheerful affirmations like, “Heaven is Always Here and Now,” “Let Go,” and “Dissolve the Walls of Separation with Love.” If there’s irony here, it would feel shitty to lean into it, and the cozy, ambient intimacy cuts it like a warm knife.

Given the fast pace at which Sean’s life has moved, the artist has said he used photography to ingest and appreciate what was going on all around him on a deeper register. He shoots his friends, and in so doing canonizes them for himself, and for his audience, amplifying their bonds and their actions and postures.

Eschewing standard photographic C-prints on paper, Sean prints onto various tender objects, creating multi-media assemblages that use domestic furniture and resemble altar pieces. The reverent stillness of the artist’s photographs, sometimes illuminated in handmade light boxes, seem at odds with the chaotic skate-tour life during which most were shot. Skating and touring skateboarders are subjects in the show but not overtly in a skating context. Instead, subjects range from the bonds of friendship to family histories, to faith as well. A friend of Sean’s since 9th grade, photographic subject Isaac Soloway is the lowest-key celebrity on record. Here, Soloway’s image is stitched lovingly into throw pillows and emblazoned on the show’s t-shirt for sale.

Growing up without organized religion, Sean Pablo took an interest in the lapsed Catholic practices of his parents. A Season in Hell reflects the conundrums of religion in this indirect way, or as in the paradoxical piousness projected by gangster iconography while gangster culture contains so much violence. The artist’s work examines what happens to imagery as it is pulled in these different directions.

Gallery