Josh Kline: Capture and Sequestration | Opening Reception
Saturday, October 12 :: 6-8pm
@ art hall
The videos in Josh Kline’s Capture and Sequestration center four iconic commodities made from materials that powered America’s rise as the world’s preeminent military, economic, and cultural power: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and oil. Through these materials, it is possible to trace the lineage of human-made global warming and climate change back through America’s global empire and the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the most painful parts of US history–the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. Pulling harmful substances out of the atmosphere and burying them in the ground is routinely discussed as a possible–but highly experimental–potential solution to the climate crisis. Suck the carbon out of the air and hide it deep underground. Through advanced technology, carbon capture and sequestration magically reverses the process that caused the crisis in the first place. What would it look like to apply this approach to other toxic atmospheres?
Created as part of Kline’s recent installation Personal Responsibility–which debuted at the Whitney Museum in 2023 and is currently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, LosAngeles–the Capture and Sequestration videos will be shown for the first time as a stand-alone, immersive, four-channel video installation. A group of related sculptures will accompany the videos. Capture and Sequestration is part of a larger cycle of projects about the politics and economics of the Twenty-First Century.
Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia) works in installation, video, sculpture, and photography. In his works, he questions how emergent technologies are being used to change human life in the 21st Century. Kline often utilizes the technologies, practices, and forms he scrutinizes–digitization, image manipulation, 3D-printing, commercial and political advertising, productivity-enhancing substances–aiming them back at themselves. At its core, Kline’s practice is focused on work and class, exploring how today’s most urgent social and political issues–climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy–impact the people who make up the labor force.
In 2024, Kline opened solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (until January 5, 2025) and Lisson Gallery, New York (until October 19, 2024); and was included in the 24th Biennale of Sydney and the 8th Yokohama Triennial. In 2023 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the first U.S. museum survey of his work. Kline’s art has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and MoMA PS1 in New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; LAXART, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; ICA Philadelphia; MOCA Cleveland; Portland Art Museum; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; KW, Berlin; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Modern Art Oxford, UK; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; and MCAD Manila, Philippines, among many others. Kline’s works are included in the collections of major museums including those of The Museum of Modern Art; The Guggenheim; The Whitney Museum; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Josh Kline is mixed-race and Filipino-American. He lives and works in New York City.
This is his first exhibition in Baltimore.