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.

CCProjects is pleased to announce “Namedaruma,” the first solo exhibition in the United States by New York-based Japanese photographer Jiro Konami. The show emerges from a book of photographs Konami made in collaboration with i-D magazine and The Black Eye Patch, who worked with the artist at the end of 2020 to shoot a vastly popular but previously unseen Japanese rap group, also called Namedaruma. For the project, Konami traveled two hours north of Tokyo to the musicians’ hometown of Kumagaya City in Saitama prefecture. In the book comprising his shots of the band, Konami writes of violence he experienced in the US in 2020 due to bigotry against Asian people, which swelled horrifically around the coronavirus pandemic. Of Namedaruma themselves Konami writes, “My heart was stung by their red gaze. The needle has been sticking in my heart since then.”

Konami came to prominence in Japan on the forefront of a new generation of young photographers electing to use analog film in our digital age. The artist skillfully makes use of both the evidentiary quality and the uncontrolled haze of analog, which he treats almost as a living organism prone to imperfection, error and surprise. Konami has spoken about the importance of a vigilant and voluminous practice as a photographer; he was once advised by Takuma Nakahira to “take one photo every three steps while walking,” and to “be a camera.” In an age where our idea of photo has migrated from documentation to concoction, Konami’s work stands as a reminder of something grimier, more natural, and more palpably real.

The photographs on view at CCProjects emerge almost entirely from Konami’s trip to Kumagaya City. The members of Namedaruma grew up in this tough, industrial city in the 90s and 2000s, at the same time that the Japanese government cracked down with extreme force on gang activities. A part of the younger generation who would usually enter Yakuza gang life, the band instead began their defiant artistic collaboration, rapping about their highly contraband marijuana use, lost friends and street life.

Konami’s photographs of Namedaruma were the first the musicians allowed to be taken and shared in mass culture. He was welcomed into spaces never before seen: the rappers at home with their families and even bathing at their local bathhouse. Confrontational portraits mix with a still life of glittering golden jewelry, a huge, ominous sky, urban landscapes, and an interior painted reproduction of a landscape that draws our attention to the kitschy absurdity innate to human design. Konami’s unprecedented access and raw style bring our minds back to actual flesh and felt human connections. His work suggests that castaway seediness can indeed come to fruition, that those forced underground will find a way to flourish, and it also reminds us of the thumping, unconventional beauty of a larger natural world that witnesses all of our strange projects here.

Jiro Konami has won several awards, including the Prospect Prize at the EPSON Color Imaging Contest, and the Fuji Photo Salon the New Face Prize. His work has been featured in The New York Times, i-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, Vogue JAPAN, and WIRED. In 2021/22, Konami presented a solo exhibition with accompanying monograph, “Burning Drop,” at the PARCO Museum, Tokyo.

Feed Folks Workshop is a community initiative produced by CCProjects. Founded in 2020, Feed Folks Workshop is an ongoing collaborative project that brings together artists and organizations across the United States to raise awareness surrounding critical social issues and provide essential resources to those in need. To raise funds, Feed Folks Workshop produces limited-edition zines, T-shirts, and prints featuring works by contributing artists that capture and celebrate the visceral energy and cultural diversity that makes up the fabric of a community. Feed Folks Workshop is pleased to announce the launch of Series 01 in partnership with Playground Youth in Brooklyn, New York, featuring works by Quinn Batley, Adam Zhu, and Dave Schubert.

CCProjects is pleased to present Dumb Kid by Ciara Gabellini. Dumb Kid is an immersive installation that amalgamates Gabellini’s own photographs with found imagery, notebook pages, and collages made from a combination of all her source materials. Gabellini’s subject matter reflects the reality of American adolescence today, with a preoccupation on sex, drugs and death. Her photographic work reveals an acute tension between the loss of innocence and vulnerability. This is Gabellini’s first solo exhibition

CCProjects is pleased to present Our Beautyfull Future, a solo exhibition by photographer Davide Sorrenti, opening June 26, 2019 at 431 East 6th Street. The exhibition displays a range of photographs including self-portraits, photos of youth culture in New York City, and intimate portraits of those who were close with him, all of which act as a visual diary to Davide’s world before his death in 1997.

Davide Sorrenti (1976–1997) was born in Naples, Italy where he was diagnosed with Thalassemia Major, a genetic and chronic illness, which prompted his mother, fashion photographer Francesca Sorrenti, to move him and his siblings, Vanina & Mario, back to New York City in the early 1980s. It was there that Davide began taking photographs at the age of 17, documenting the daily life of his skate and graffiti crew, SKE.

Davide’s images are characterized by a promiscuous, youthful vision and ability to immortalize personal moments that serve as a time capsule of downtown New York in the mid 1990s. He had a need to document everything he observed and engaged with his surroundings in a way that invites the viewer to become a part of his life.

This collection of photographs unveils Davide’s sense of urgency to live beyond his years by immersing himself at the center of a cultural movement and recording every waking moment. What remains is the gift of a rare and personal account of a momentous generation that continues to influence contemporary youth till this day.

“The intimacy and love that Davide Sorrenti conveyed in his photographs will never fade. Still full of the visual charge that he gave to his life through photography, they are disarmingly truthful in their emotional articulation of being wildly, and intensely young. Set within the still raw and menacing pre-Giuliani playground of New York in the early to mid 1990s, this precious cache captures the last passionately youthful moment on the cusp of the city’s commodification and sanitization. They are an elegiac and close testimony to a young man’s life, filled with curiosity and unbounded enthusiasm.”

— Charlotte Cotton, 2016

CCProjects presents Laurie. Documentary film by Zev Magasis. Laurie is named after a woman Zev met in the beginning of a road trip across the United States. Zev lived and slept in his car for two months by choice, whereas Laurie still lives in hers to this day. She once said, “I just want peaceful existence, there’s just no chaos 24 hours a day, you cannot close both eyes, you always gotta have one open.” She struggles to keep her soul and spirit afloat in spite of her situation, preserving herself in her deeply personal writings stored away in her car. The wisdom and strength passed down to Zev by Laurie and her poems kept him going throughout the ups and downs of his trip, and through life in general. This video is dedicated to Laurie and to all the people Zev encountered while driving across the country.

Desire Lines are paths created by human, animal or vehicular traffic, often representing a short cut or disruption of land. These paths run contrary to the designs of urban planning and resist the rules of how public and private spaces are meant to be used. They are an index of disobedience and movement.

Shot entirely in parking lots over the course of a year and a half, Desire Lines records humans, animals and automobiles behaving in a similar manner with the urgency to perform actions that override the behavioral programming of the place they occupy. The film surveys various customs and rituals that are carried out in the vast areas adjacent to shopping malls, sports stadiums, schools, and other venues throughout the United States.

“The shopping strip and its paved surroundings are so ubiquitous in the American landscape that often people never give this entire phenomenon a second thought, it is a universally accepted part of everyone's collective unconscious… but then some have a subliminal identity with things in their environment, they recognize the presence of this hostile slab which inspires a range of interpretations… things are done spontaneously that give life to what is otherwise considered dead.”

— James Wines

Desire Lines was filmed in Birmingham, AL, Huntsville, AL, Los Angeles, CA, Fort Lauderdale, FL, Hallandale Beach, FL, Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, New Orleans, LA, Berlin, MD, Greensboro, NC, Greenville, NC, Raleigh, NC, Statesville, NC, Philadelphia, PA, Albuquerque, NM, Belen, NM, Edgewood, NM, Columbia, SC, Pine Ridge, SD, Yankton, SD, Bartlett, TN, Memphis, TN and South Boston, VA.

The film features original music and sound design by Joe Williams.

Tommy Malekoff (b. 1992) is a New York based artist from North Carolina. His work with video and photography deals with insular words and displaced phenomena in the American landscape. His work has been exhibited in New York, Detroit, and Tokyo.