Gorillaz Collaborator Stephen Thomas Gallagher Debuts at The Pit in Los Angeles

There are a lot of people who say they have the coolest job in the world. Stephen Thomas Gallagher may actually have a case.

He has designed live shows for Gorillaz and Lana Del Rey. He helped build a blazing London tower, had a Tube train burst through it at Glastonbury, and for a time brought a small slice (or rather, a chunk) of 1970s New York City to London. In his latest project, he flies over the Port of Los Angeles in a bright yellow helicopter, with the doors closed and the helicopter passing between cranes lifting containers onto freighters as Dr. Dre shouts into his headphones.

But he assured me in a recent phone interview that he was just a regular guy. Our nearly hour-long conversation focused less on spectacle and more on everyday activities, like baking.

“I’m actually making dough this week – making bread. If you can believe it, it’s something I haven’t done since lockdown. Everyone was doing it but for some reason I completely stopped once I could buy it from the local shop,” he said, starting to laugh. “Mine is simple, but everything is better homemade.”

Later this month, Gallagher, the creative director of one of the most ambitious audio-visual groups of the 21st century, makes his US gallery debut with a one-night screening Sunset: Baboon’s Joya hypnotic video work that is both industrial and dreamy. The exhibition, which opens on Tuesday, February 24 at The Pit in Los Angeles, marks what the gallery calls an “ambitious new phase of personal work” and is the first of a planned 12-part series titled time.

The trailer for the video cuts to the baboons from an aerial view of the harbor, whose waters are strangely glowing pink and gold. It’s psychedelic, yet calming. This is no accident.

The project began in Coventry, England, far from sun-drenched Los Angeles. Gallagher had been researching the city’s post-war reconstruction when he stumbled upon a small carving of the Egyptian sun god Aton hidden on the back of a shopping mall pillar. The town planners who rebuilt Coventry had been obsessed with Egyptology. This led Gallagher down a rabbit hole, leading to the Amduat, an ancient funerary text that chronicles the sun god’s 12-hour journey through the night.

Amduat, he said, is “about what happens when we fall asleep. It’s about what happens when we die. It’s about traveling through the darkest places and being reborn.”

In Gallagher’s contemporary version, the vessel that carries us through the night is not the mythical solar ship but the shipping container at the beginning of the video.

Instead of Egyptian bark gliding through the underworld, we see steel boxes stacked on cargo ships crossing the ocean. Global supply chains become humanity’s connective tissue. Gallagher said the replacement kettles, the late-night Amazon orders, the people packaging them at the factory, the people loading them onto the boats at the docks: they’re all connected. “We do know this, but we choose to ignore it in the name of convenience,” he added.

For this production, Gallagher went straight to the source. While in California for the Coachella music festival in 2023, he rented a helicopter from Compton. “Do you want me to open the door?” the pilot asked, to which Gallagher responded, yes, please.

Two planes flew low over the port, between cranes lifting containers onto ships. “I thought we were going to get shot down,” he said with a laugh. “It was unbelievable.” Some footage was later shot in his hometown of Donegal on Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

And then there’s the weirdest part of the story: Gallagher edited the film while asleep.

He was fascinated by the hypnotic state, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. He had read about artists like Salvador Dalí who would doze off with keys in their hands, placing them on metal plates to stay awake for the moment they drifted away. Gallagher tried. He would sit in a chair in his studio, think deeply about containers and Amduat, and then let himself doze off. When he slips, he wakes up and writes notes.

“It’s awesome,” he said. “It’s a state where creative problem solving really shines.” Sunset From those sessions emerged something from the liminal mental space between clarity and dreams.

Gallagher’s method Sunset Not too far removed from his past work. The studio he co-founded, Block9, is known for its large-scale installations at Glastonbury, Somerset’s long-running performing arts festival. One of Block9’s most memorable contributions is a complete New York street set that hides a late-’70s gay nightclub.

Alongside the iconic virtual band Gorillaz, he helped create a live show centered around the idea of ​​”Demon Day,” the band’s second album whose title was born out of a glitch in Server Park due to a slip between time and space. When asked about working with Gorillaz co-founder Damon Albarn, Gallagher said the songwriter’s attitude was always, “Let’s do it, we’re making art.”

This ethos informs Gallagher’s personal work, albeit on a different scale. At The Pit, the spectacle is internal. There’s no stage rigging or 65-foot-tall head, just a single-channel screen, a soundscape and scenes that float slowly into darkness.

Sunset: Baboon’s Joy Technically prologue timethe moment before the night begins. Ultimately, Gallagher envisioned the entire project as a multi-room installation in which viewers could move, faced with shadow and light, smoothness and friction. “You can’t have one without the other,” he said. “If everything is smoothed out, you have nothing to compare it to.”

Now, though, he was satisfied with the beginning: a ship getting ready to sail, or an artist’s mind beginning to wander—so that he could see more clearly.