JACOB DYRENFORTH: The Youth Are Getting Restless

JACOB DYRENFORTH
The Youth Are Getting Restless

Opening reception: Wed, May 27, 6-8PM
Exhibition: May 27 – July 18, 2026

Wil Aballe
1375 Railspur Alley, Vancouver, BC
Hours: Tues – Sat, 12-5 PM

For inquiries please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com

Wil Aballe is pleased to announce The Youth Are Getting Restless. Dyrenforth will present a series of work utilizing his signature style of meticulously rendered, highly detailed drawings based on degraded, compressed, and low‑res digital images culled from the internet, photographed on a phone, or generated by AI.

The Youth Are Getting Restless focuses on crowd theory, specifically the concept of the “supraorganism“. When a group assembles en masse and loses their individualism and personal agency, the collective influence of the group coalesces to create an organism that moves and acts of its own intentions and desires. A throng, a mob, a horde, the results can be transformative, beautiful, and creative. In this state, the group can produce new models of self‑expression and art that ripple through time and space—or the results can be catastrophic: violence and destruction, mindless and insatiable. Dyrenforth’s images draw from a broad range of contemporary and historical cultural moments, from the birth of house music on the dance floors of private clubs in the late 1970s, to a film set re‑enacting the insurrection in Washington, D.C., on January 6th. There is a profligration of images in the modern world; Dyrenforth’s intensive manual rendering of these digital images slow down and concretize these moments of collectivity.

JACOB DYRENFORTH currently lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. He received his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; and High Desert Test Site, Joshua Tree, California. He has had solo gallery exhibitions at Renwick Gallery, New York; Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles; Wallspace Gallery, New York; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; and has shown in galleries such as Zwirner & Wirth, New York; Museum 52, New York; and Harris Lieberman, New York.

The Youth Are Getting Restless is his first show with Wil Aballe.