March is pleased to present Break neck speeds, Y. Malik Jalal’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Rooted in the aesthetics of interstate highways––which he refers to as “arguably the greatest stage and metaphor of the modern drama”––Jalal surveys a wide range of phenomena through the lenses of acceleration and impact. Echoing traces of labor left upon this familiar landscape,Break neck speeds considers the roles of materiality and absence. The artist intervenes in the trajectories of found objects with freshly-fused steel: photographs are carefully cropped and encased in sleek frames, collaged print relics are positioned in silvery mounts, pages gilded and obscured. In mediating these material relationships and histories, Jalal proposes collision as the ultimate generator, and horror as essential to fantasy.

A distinct characteristic of modern geography is the abject space of interstate highways. They’re familiar to us, integral to our daily lives … but uninhabitable and entirely devoted to capital, production, and warfare.

(Y. Malik Jalal)

When Malik and I first started our conversations around this body of work, I began by asking: Why here?, Why now? and What connects all of these ideas? There are so many threads––Blackness, nationality, post-industrial production, highways, automobiles, intimate relics of religious architecture. Rooted in Malik’s early life in the ever-developing city of Atlanta and refined by several years of studio and life experience from Savannah to New Haven, this body of work balances materiality with absence, mapping indivisible histories.

Malik is enamored with acceleration: “The only way to get where we’re going is in a car”. It may be counterintuitive to break the routine of slowing down to view art, but he is asking us to speed up, to consider what art can be or should be. We hurtle through space on our asteroid set to self-destruct, and speed is important––it is one of the few things we strive for collectively.

Perfect timing.

Humans have sculpted countless ideas/concepts/truths that we continue to deepen every day.

Does it matter?
Does it have to have a historical precedent?
Does it need to be explained?

Is there some solace to be found in aimlessness? We wander around daily thinking about how we will be remembered, how our work will be remembered, how we fit into the picture. We look for patterns, but as soon as our framework is established, something happens and it is destroyed. We pause. Sometimes, it is necessary to drop the search-engine-pilled looking and computer enhanced quantifying to enjoy what is in front of us.

Malik invites this effortlessly with Break neck speeds. When asked to list his top three materials, he first said iron, steel, and stainless steel, then quickly elaborated that those are all iron alloys. He edited his answer to iron (and its alloys), rubber, and loss. If you’re not careful you might move too quickly and miss the intangible materials; if you’re too careful you might get bogged down in unnecessary details and miss the deft use of tangible ones. Malik is the highway patrol in each instance. With every artwork, he is setting the speed limit and the minimum speed, boundaries created to keep us safe, focused, and in sync with everyone else on the road.

(David Lisbon)

Y. Malik Jalal lives and works between New Haven, Connecticut and Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2024 and his BA from Oglethorpe University in 2016. Previous solo exhibitions include Bent at March (New York, NY), Of joy and terror at the Coleman Art Center (York, AL), Altars to the liver at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), and A study of the supernatural phenomena of emergence at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL). He has exhibited in group shows at April in Paris (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Murmurs (Los Angeles, CA), Yossi Milo (New York, NY), et al. (San Francisco, CA), Hi-Lo Press (Atlanta, GA), and the Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), among others. Jalal has curated group exhibitions at The Hi-Lo Press and the High Rise Exhibition. His zine, A brief history of the world vol. 1, was released exclusively at For Keeps Books in 2020.