Allen Ball: Forest Lane
April 8 — 24, 2026
Opening: Wednesday, April 8, 6—8 pm
EFA Gallery is pleased to announce Forest Lane, a solo exhibition by Allen Ball. The exhibition brings together new and recent works from painting, found objects, and sound. Forest Lane was made possible by a Focus Award, a commissioning grant designed to support ambitious presentations of new work at EFA. Ball’s practice investigates infrastructure, geology, and visibility within built environments.
The title Forest Lane refers to a name that preserves an image of nature while marking its erasure. Roadlight, 2026, presents a decommissioned high-pressure sodium street light, which emits the familiar buzz of high-voltage electricity. Mounted at chest height across the threshold and rotated so its unlit halophane lens meets the viewer’s gaze directly, the work stages a change in orientation.
At the center of the exhibition, Overspill, 2026, and Attenuation, 2026, hang off-center on adjacent walls. Made with natural green earth pigments, carbon black, and linen, these works condense geological duration into dense surfaces where layered accumulations of paint suggest sedimentation and pressure as both a material process and a perceptual condition.
Trace 115, 2020, rests atop a tall mirror-topped pedestal that requires the viewer to lean in. This diminutive work on wood utilizes pigments derived from hand-foraged clays and soils. The painted surface, obtained through multiple layers of paint applied over several days, is then returned to the sites where its pigments were gathered; its partially polymerized film records its journey. In contrast to Roadlight, this surface records raw accumulation and stands in for the material strata that persist beneath the grid.
Across the gallery, the interplay of mineral surfaces, paint, sound, and street furniture coexist as a system of competing temporalities. Ball stages a space in which visibility, duration, and the body’s orientation remain unsettled.
Allen Ball, Trace 115, 2020