PDF Press Release

EFA Gallery is pleased to announce Forest Lane, a solo exhibition by Allen Ball. The exhibition brings together new and recent works spanning 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.

For this exhibition, Ball draws from the residential street, where the title Forest Lane preserves an image of nature while marking its erasure through development. Anchoring the installation is Roadlight, 2026, a decommissioned high-pressure sodium streetlight. Mounted at chest height across the threshold and rotated so its unlit halophane lens meets the viewer’s gaze directly, Roadlight emits the familiar buzz of high-voltage electricity, rendering a familiar form of public infrastructure confrontational and estranged. 

Two paintings, 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 material processes and perceptual conditions.

Trace 115, 2020, is presented atop a tall mirror-topped pedestal that requires the viewer to lean in to see the work. This diminutive work on wood employs 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; contact with the terrain mars its partially polymerized film. The surface operates as a record of exposure, accumulation, and return. In contrast to Roadlight, which imposes the industrial grid, it registers raw accumulation and stands in for the material strata that persist beneath it. 

Across the gallery, mineral surfaces, paint, sound, and street furniture coexist as a system of competing temporalities. Ball stages a space in which visibility, duration, and bodily orientation remain unsettled. 

Ball holds an MFA from Pratt Institute (2019) and a BFA in Fine Art and Art History from the University of North Florida (2017). He maintains a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, The Monira Foundation in Jersey City, and the Garment District Alliance Space for Public Art in New York.

EFA Gallery is the exhibition space of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, dedicated to supporting artists at all stages of their practice and to presenting work that reflects the social, material, and political conditions shaping contemporary life. Rooted in EFA’s longstanding commitment to artists, experimentation, and cultural sustainability, EFA Gallery serves as a platform for dialogue between artistic production, public engagement, and the evolving role of artists within the city.

Press Contact: 

Allen Ball, allenthomasball@gmail.com 

Deric Carner, Associate Director EFA Studio Program, deric@efanyc.org