Jay Payton & Tom Koehler: Gasoline @ House of Seiko

House of Seiko is pleased to present Gasoline, a two-person exhibition by Jay Payton and Tom Koehler, opening March 13 at the gallery’s San Francisco space. The exhibition takes its title from Gregory Corso’s 1958 book of poems, a touchstone of Beat writing that captures a restless search for meaning through observation, and sudden flashes of realization.

Corso’s poems move through empty landscapes, charged interior spaces, and the wandering terrain of thought itself. In Gasoline, Payton and Koehler approach the exhibition as a similar territory. Paths appear and disappear, suggesting movements that have already taken place. What remains are fragments, marks of passage, and traces that hint at experience.

Opening just before winter gives way to spring, the exhibition reflects a moment of transition. Much of what appears here suggests a landscape that has been unsettled or cleared, where something new might begin to emerge.

One recurring motif, the bomb, introduces a paradox. Referencing Corso’s poem Bomb, the image functions less as a symbol of destruction than as a moment of ignition: a flash capable of leveling what exists while opening space for transformation. In this sense, the bomb becomes closer to a sun, a source of energy that reshapes the terrain it touches.

Throughout the exhibition, familiar symbols appear in altered form: a frowning face assembled from dollar bills titled –$38,430,000,000,000, a cracked mirror that fractures reflection, quiet observations of ants moving through their own dense systems of organization. Humor and unease sit together.

By placing recognizable objects into unfamiliar contexts, Payton and Koehler reconsider the cultural signs, economic structures, and natural systems that shape contemporary life. Seen together, the works unfold like simultaneous thoughts, colliding and drifting apart, recalling the open-ended conversations of Beat writers searching for new ways of seeing.