Central Server Works is pleased to present Count Backwards From 10, a solo exhibition by Sean Shim-Boyle, opening April 26 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM at our Downtown Los Angeles gallery space.

This marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and centers on a new body of work and one archival work, including a sculptural architectural intervention and a series of paintings utilizing medical-grade silicone. Count Backwards From 10 continues Shim-Boyle’s exploration of site specificity, materiality, time, and the body’s relationship to constructed space.

The exhibition title refers to the countdown administered before anesthesia takes effect—a moment of suspension, transition, and surrender. Drawing from his recent reflections on materiality, states of form and consciousness, ritual, health, and the liminality of the human body, Shim-Boyle’s work explores the precarious nature of control within both physical and psychological spaces, emphasizing a rigorous engagement with craft and studio practice while offering profound commentary on art production, material innovation, and the dynamics of the studio.

Anchoring the exhibition is the titular work, a monumental sculptural architectural intervention. Count Backwards From 10 is a site-specific installation that meticulously replicates a traditional dropped ceiling, reimagined through cast plastic, synthetic silk, foam, and cardboard. Designed to the exact dimensions of Central Server Works’ 334 Main Street gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, the work extends Shim-Boyle’s ongoing exploration of architectural structures as sculptural forms, employing advancements in his casting techniques developed over the past two years.

The dropped ceiling, a ubiquitous feature of modern commercial and institutional spaces, originated in Japan in the 14th century before becoming a symbol of corporate efficiency in postwar America. Often associated with concealing infrastructure and reinforcing notions of control and uniformity, Shim-Boyle’s deconstructed and semi-melted cast version disrupts these associations, exposing the artifice and fragility of the built environment. This intervention transforms a banal architectural element into a meditative, almost spectral presence, interrogating the relationship between space, memory, and materiality.

Alongside this architectural intervention, Shim-Boyle presents a series of paintings executed with medical-grade silicone, positioning his work within a lineage of material experimentation that challenges traditional notions of surface and medium. Unlike oil or acrylic, which build opacity and depth through layering, silicone creates a membrane-like surface that feels simultaneously durable and precarious—suggesting both protection and exposure. In Count Backwards From 10 a selection of new (all 2025) works in the series are curated from a larger body of works that further the innovative method of abstraction by way of material experimentation.

Shim-Boyle’s material choices carry a quiet intensity, balancing between exposure and preservation, where surface becomes a record of memory. Medical-grade silicone, infused with transdermal pigment, doesn’t just coat—it seeps in, staining and retaining like skin marked by time, touch, or trauma. His works hold a fragile tension, their smooth, synthetic surfaces teetering between sterility and rupture, control and surrender. While artists like Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis pushed against rigid formalism with raw, organic materials, Shim-Boyle’s approach is more precise—almost surgical—mirroring the way the body absorbs and remembers, whether through scars, bruises, or medical intervention.

Sean Shim-Boyle’s practice interrogates the unseen structures—both literal and ideological—that frame artistic production, extending a lineage of institutional critique into material and architectural terms. His spatial interventions expose the hidden economies and systems that sustain the art world, making visible the labor, maintenance, and infrastructural forces that shape cultural production. A key historical reference for this approach is Michael Asher’s 2008 intervention at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now ICA LA), which required the museum to remain open 24/7 for two weeks, revealing the operational and human costs of institutional function. While Asher’s work foregrounded endurance and institutional labor, Shim-Boyle reconfigures space itself, using architecture as a medium to lay bare the forces that condition artistic and institutional practice.

Beyond material, the artworks in Count Backwards From 10 speak to deeper questions about perception, embodiment, and space. There’s a connection to Tishan Hsu’s exploration of the body’s relationship to technology, where synthetic surfaces blur the line between human and machine. At the same time, his architectural interventions echo Chris Burden’s investigations into power and control—revealing the hidden structures that shape how we move through the world. Burden’s Samson (1985), a piece in which visitors unwittingly contribute to the potential destruction of the gallery space by pushing through a turnstile connected to a wooden beam bracing the walls, offers a particularly relevant parallel. Both Burden and Shim-Boyle expose the mechanics of built environments, yet where Burden’s work threatens collapse, Shim-Boyle offers a moment of suspension, like the breath before slipping under anesthesia. Here, material, memory, and space fold into one another, capturing a body in flux—somewhere between exposure and protection, presence and dissolution.

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