Zebra Music
Sunday Fall, Jahi Kijo Lendor, lan Kline and Dylan Matsuno
curated by Gunner Dongieux
June 1-14, 2024
404 | Berlin Art Institute
Berlin, Germany




















Pop Gun presents ‘Zebra Music,’ an exhibition of works by Sunday Fall, Jahi Kijo Lendor, lan Kline and Dylan Matsuno, curated by Gunner Dongieux.
The title Zebra Music comes from the 1975 William Gaddis novel, J R. As a satiric portrayal of American entrepreneurialism, the novel weaves between the plots of a 4th grade student building an elaborate multi-million-dollar penny-stock scheme, and a music composer, pulled away from his passion by his financial reliance on commissioned work. Strapped for cash, the composer agrees to score a Safari film for a rich client, producing what he calls “Zebra Music.”
Centered around four unique studio practices, Zebra Music investigates “career” through the tongue-in-cheek lens of American Hustle Culture. Exhibited works showcase artists at invoiceable hours, fixating upon the material fruits of their labor. “The grind,” “the hustle,” the dew of clock-time productivity, are all rendered as observable objects.
Sunday Fall’s series of pharmacy-photo-prints depict the daily life of a working artist in New York City. On the door, a young boy rifles through the business section of the newspaper while crossing the street. Images of everyday detritus draw forth phantoms of side hustles, like doordashing on a citibike, while consumer-centric imagery calls into question the motives of the American Pop Art project. Mirrored compositions play the artist as product; a Santa Claus in Crocs, a stack of Campbell’s soup cans, a duragged busker, a self portrait. Pop refrains, like an NYC skyline, are repeated in gradient chorus, while luxury items remain out of range.
Jahi Kijo Lendor’s fore love & time freestyle 102 pulls together scenes of black excellence, sourced from twitter and the artist’s own extensive digital archive. Centering upon the gesture of a raised wrist, Lendor enshrines success in the quotidian, framing images of A-list celebrities in
bricolaged foam, seeds, beads and gum. The wristwatch stands as a symbol of earned merit; of clout gained via records or on field production. Rappers YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Rick Ross, and student athlete Shadeur Sanders all flaunt their iced-out wrists, vehemently declaring an ownership over clock-time; As if to say, “IT’S MY TIME!”
Ian Kline surreptitiously (but legally!) steals back artistic labor, photographing the street performer “Da Gold Man” while working as an artist assistant on a shoot for photographer Paul Pfeiffer. Like artist Heji Shin, who utilizes resources from her commercial photo shoots to produce new bodies work for her solo art exhibitions, Ian offers Paul, Travis, Jason as an image made on-the-clock.
Dylan Matsuno paints scenes from his current and past occupations in the style of Family Guy. A full time clothier from Hawaii, Matsuno initially gained exposure to painting while living in Rhode Island (the setting of Family Guy), inside Joshua Boulos and Baijun Chen’s Apartment 13 gallery. In his paintings Matsuno meticulously adheres to the official Family Guy style guide: a strict manual of rules given to commercial TV animators intended to maintain a consistent level of stylistic unity; Specifications are dictated down to the number of blenders allowed on a counter, or shirts allowed on a rack. Despite working within such strict stylistic parameters, perhaps reflective of rigid structures within his own work life, Matsuno’s sequence suggests an upward occupational trajectory. On June 1st, the day of the opening, Dylan will be in Osaka, Japan, at the release his newest ‘Deerskin’ menswear collection.
– Gunner Dongieux
Sunday Fall is an artist living and working in New York. Recent exhibitions include , EMERALD CITY BLUE (2023) at KAI MATSUMIYA, NEW YORK, DRAWING ROOM (2023) at ROOM 3557, LOS ANGELES, and A gathering (2021) at HOUSING , NEW YORK.
Jahi Kijo Lendor (b.1991, Brooklyn, NY) is a Black-Dominican American, NY/NJ-based artist whose work focuses on reflecting on how he sees life and his environment, which translates to a multi-melaninated reality of the Black experience. His work has been exhibited in “Black Biennial” at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI and at the RISD MFA Painting show “Rota Fortunae” at Field Projects in New York, among others. Lendor graduated with a BFA and a BA from Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2019. He was a Society of Presidential Fellows recipient at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, where he received his MFA in Painting in 2023.
Ian Kline is a photographer from York, PA. Ian received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He is included in private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (Rabbit/Hare, 2020). He has had solo exhibitions at Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA, 2019), Space Place (Nizhniy Tagil, Russia, 2018), and Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH, 2016). He has had two-person exhibitions at Pop Gun (New York, NY, 2023), LCVA (Farmville, VA, 2020), The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY, 2018), and Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD, 2018). His work has been included in group exhibitions at David Zwirner (New York, NY, 2022) and UTA Artist Space (Beverly Hills, CA, 2022) among others. Kline has published 9 artist books and currently lives in New York.
Dylan Matsuno is a clothier living and working in Providence, Rhode Island. Matsuno's family
origins in Hawaii date back to the year 1900 as immigrant sugarcane plantation laborers,
arriving as Buddhist farmers from the outskirts of Hiroshima, Japan. All of Matsuno's work is informed by his family's history and living as a fourth-generation Japanese-American born and
raised in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Gunner Dongieux (b. 1998, New Orleans, LA) lives and works in New York City. His painting practice employs a series of site-specific puns and celebrity motifs in relation to artword success models. Gunner attended BAI in 2022. During his residency, he began reading J R.