James Warren: The Half-life of a Sign
April 10-May 6, 2026
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002
Press Release
Opening Reception
April 10, 6-8 PM
Open Hours: Fridays-Sundays, 1-5 PM & by appointment
Before arriving in the Two Bridges space in early April with a van full of recent work, the artist had recently returned from a three-month journey across the Southwest as part of the Land Arts of the American West field season. On the road through Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, Warren and his cohort visited sites such as Sun Tunnels, Spiral Jetty, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation––encounters that have formed the conceptual and material ground of his latest practice.
Warren approaches image-making as an expanded field: not only a means of depicting the built environment, but a way of entering into it––constructing, influencing, and becoming part of its conditions. Across painting, photography, and constructed image-objects, the practice attends to the unstable and flexible relationship between site and representation. Images are shaped by acts of looking, framing, and return; never singular, but layered, recursive, and contingent.
Central to the presentation at Service is an investigation of figure and ground—the shifting threshold between human-made structures and the landscapes they inhabit. This distinction becomes porous in the body of works.
A recurring concern is the image as “re-presentation”—a return that is always partial. Photographs and paintings operate as remains of encounters with sites that cannot be fully carried forward. The loss is embedded within the image itself. Rather than resolving this, Warren treats it generative, allowing repetition and layering to accumulate as a record of repeated attempts to see and make sense of a place over time.
This logic extends through transmedial strategies––images within images, frames within frames, and references to prior acts of documentation. As the artist likes to remember, “someone had stood at this site before me and tried to make sense of it… and someone else before that.” Meaning emerges not from the site or its documentation alone, but through their ongoing negotiation.
At Service, these questions expand into the spatial logic of the installation. Images move off the walls and into the room as objects and structures. In doing so, they operate less as representations of a landscape and more as elements within one.
The exhibition approaches the condition of a “non-site,” where the image does not stand in for elsewhere, but becomes a site in its own right. Images function as fields of relation rather than fixed documents. The photographs pulled from a personal archive of over 200 documentations from his recent travels in the installation form a distributed system of looking: a landscape composed of fragments, instruments, and propositions.
The Half-life of a Sign considers how meaning persists and decays across these conditions. Like a signal that diminishes over time, each work holds onto fragments––of place, perception, and prior interpretation––without fully resolving them. What remains is not a stable image, but a field of relations in flux: an environment where viewers, objects, and images participate in an ongoing process of translation, attention, and return.
– Text by Seoyoung Kim
James Warren (b. 1999) lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 and has exhibited in New York, Brooklyn, and Providence, RI. In 2025, he was a participant in the Land Arts of the American West program at Texas Tech University, researching and making in the American Southwest. Working primarily with painting, drawing, and photography, his work is concerned with dialectical landscapes—where natural forces and human intervention intersect. He is interested in the possibility of image-making as something which can not only depict the built environment, but also influence, construct, and become a part of it.
The Correlator (Very Large Array), 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches
American Museum of Natural History I, 2025, Oil on canvas over panel, 14 x 11 inches
American Museum of Natural History II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches
Images courtesy of the artist
Service is a proud partner of the New York-based curatorial partnership Nine.
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