The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts 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. 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 an unlit, decommissioned high-pressure sodium street light, emitting the familiar buzzing of high-voltage electricity. Hung 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 are Title, 2026, Title 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 that exceed the media and infrastructures currently framing them.Trace 75, 2023, and Trace 56, 2022, rest atop a tall pedestal that requires the viewer to lean in. These diminutive works on wood utilize pigments derived from hand-foraged clays and soils. The painted surfaces, obtained through multiple layers of paint applied over several days, are then gathered and returned the field on subsequent collection trips; their partially polymerized films record their journey. In contrast to Roadlight, these surfaces record raw accumulation and stand 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.