Approaching a rave is unsettling. Tracing the rattling walls of a condemned warehouse, passing through its humid threshold, the anticipatory and apprehensive swells that don’t fade no matter how many surreptitious nights one has under their belt. What follows is a game of capture and release with our senses, repressing some in order to heighten others, against a darkened cacophony. It compels the most repressed of us to engage our deepest expressions of bodily sovereignty. Somehow, the paradox of agency and capitulation in these rooms still feels spectral. Be it through substance-altered perception, and awe at the communal spectacle, or a fixation on a beam of light, the rave is a prism of sensorial abstraction for one to enter in their own way, all to make room for a universal experience - liberation through sonic immersion.
Los Angeles is uniquely placed to facilitate this evasive feeling, one that AJ Wilson articulates in this series of emotive images. With a personal inculcation in this corner of LA’s rave scene, he shows his reverence for these spaces through his commitment to leaving them undisturbed, making his presence as fleeting as the moments he captures. By utilizing only what is there, the camera is pushed to its limits as one does of themselves at 3am. The refrain from using any additive light, or pushing the composition too deeply into the space, allows us to view participants in moments of unrestrained purity, producing images that etch a textural rumination on how the unsanctioned rave feels. Knowing the color of the walls, or whether the liquid beneath one’s shoes is alcohol or sweat, is as uncertain to the raver as to us as viewers. As a result, the sanctity of these moments, hinging on their obscurity, is preserved by a personal understanding of their fragility. Outlined are the truths of these moments, attentively revealed to us; nothing more, nothing less.
That reveal is ethereal, measured and sparse. By moving away from illumination, and challenging the viewers’ impulse to anthropologically expose the rave, Los Angeles repositions our view toward the obfuscations that catalyze its intensity. With limited signifiers of the historical context we are viewing, we are instead presented with a timeless depiction of emotional viscerality. Consequently, these images emulate a similar manipulation of senses innate to the fully realized rave experience. This meditative balance of distortion and dysmorphia mirrors the perspective of someone who has somehow found a way to be present in an environment of sheer discordance. We are impelled to not merely view images of an activity, but to lean in further and be engrossed in the spirit of a moment that draws out the deepest euphoric expressions of catharsis.
In embracing these abstractions, this body of work manages to provide a cultural document: a vivid illumination of an elusive yet undeniable experience, without fully revealing its image. In his practice and fixations, AJ has constructed an uncompromising likeness of an intangible ritual that becomes immediately palpable to the viewers who have participated in it, and better understood by those who have not. One that can only be authored by someone with affection for these ecstatic moments. Offering us a way to know without fully seeing.
Foreward by Jonathan Raissi
Logo Design by Clay Gibson