Gorillaz Collaborator Stephen Thomas Gallagher Debuts at The Pit in Los Angeles

There are many people who say they have the coolest job in the world. Stephen Thomas Gallagher might actually have a case.

He designs live shows for Gorillaz and Lana Del Rey. He helped build a blazing London tower block with a tube train smashed through it at Glastonbury, and once brought a little bit (or rather, a whole chunk) of 1970s New York City to London. For his latest project, he flew in a bright yellow helicopter over the Port of Los Angeles with the doors off, Dr. Dre blasting in his headphones, as the chopper skims between cranes that hoist shipping containers onto freighters.

But he assured me, during a recent phone interview, that he is just a normal guy. Our nearly hour-long conversation leaned less toward spectacle and more toward everyday activities, like baking.

“I was actually making dough this week—making bread. Something I haven’t done since lockdown, if you can believe it. Everyone was doing it and then for some reason I completely stopped as soon as it was available to buy from the local shopping,” he said, beginning to laugh. “Mine is simple but everything is better when it’s homemade.”

Later this month, Gallagher, the creative director behind one of the 21st century’s most ambitious audio-visual bands, makes his US gallery debut, with a one-night screening of Sunset: The Jubilation of the Baboons, a hypnotic video work that feels at once industrial and dreamy. Running Tuesday, February 24, at The Pit in Los Angeles, the show marks what the gallery calls “an ambitious new phase of solo work” and it’s the first installment in a planned 12-part series titled The Hours.

The video’s trailer cuts from aerial views of the port, its water glowing pink and gold, to baboons—oddly enough. It’s trippy, yet calming. That’s not an accident.

The project began far from sun soaked Los Angeles, in Coventry, England. Gallagher had been researching the city’s postwar reconstruction when he stumbled on a tiny engraving of Aton, the Egyptian sun god, hidden on the back of a pillar in a shopping arcade. The town planner who rebuilt Coventry had been obsessed with Egyptology. That sent Gallagher down a rabbit hole toward the Amduat, an ancient funerary text that charts the sun god’s 12-hour journey through the night.

Amduat, he said, is “about what happens when we fall asleep. It’s about what happens when we die. It’s about going through the darkest places and being reborn.”

In Gallagher’s contemporary version, the vessel that carries us through the night isn’t a mythic solar boat, but the shipping container from the video’s opening.

Instead of an Egyptian bark gliding through the underworld, we get steel boxes stacked on cargo ships, moving across oceans. The global supply chain becomes the connective tissue of humanity. A replacement kettle, a late-night Amazon order, the person who packs them in a factory, the person who loads them onto the ship on a dock: they are all connected, according to Gallagher. “We sort of do know it, but we choose to ignore it in the name of convenience,” he added.

To film the piece, Gallagher went straight to the source. While in California for Coachella in 2023, he hired a helicopter out of Compton. “Do you want me to take the doors off?” the pilot asked, to which Gallagher replied, yes, please.

The two flew low over the port, between the cranes lifting containers onto ships. “I thought we were going to get shot down,” he said, laughing. “It was unbelievable.” Some footage was shot later, back home in Donegal, on Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

Then comes the strangest part of this tale: Gallagher edited the film by falling asleep.

He became fascinated with hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. He read about artists like Salvador Dalí who would doze with keys in hand, dropping them onto a metal plate to stay awake at the moment of drift. Gallagher tried it. He would sit in his studio chair, thinking deeply about shipping containers and the Amduat, then let himself nod off. When he slipped under, he’d wake and scribble notes.

“It’s so brilliant,” he said. “Creative problem solving is really brilliant in that state.” The structure of Sunset emerged from those sessions, from that liminal mental space between clarity and dream.

Gallagher’s approach to Sunset isn’t that far off from his past work. Block9, the studio he cofounded, has become known for massive installations at Glastonbury, the long-running performing arts festival in Somerset. Among Block9’s most memorable contributions there is a full New York street set hiding a late-’70s gay nightclub inside.

With Gorillaz, the iconic virtual band, he helped craft a live show built around the idea of a “Demon Day,” the title of the group’s sophomore album realized as a slippage between time and space, born from a glitch in a server park. When asked about working with Gorillaz cofounder Damon Albarn, Gallagher said the songwriter’s attitude is always “Let’s just do it, we’re making art.”

That spirit carries into Gallagher’s solo work, though here the scale is different. At The Pit, the spectacle is internal. Instead of stage rigging or 65-foot-tall heads, there’s just a one-channel screen, a soundscape, and the slow drift into darkness.

Sunset: The Jubilation of the Baboons is technically the prologue to The Hours, the moment before the first hour of night begins. Ultimately, Gallagher envisions the full project as a multi-room installation that viewers move through, confronting shadow and light, smoothness and friction. “You can’t have one without the other,” he said. “If everything is smoothed out, you’ve got nothing to compare anything to.”

For now, though, he’s content with this beginning: a ship ready to depart, or an artist’s mind beginning to drift off—so he can see more clearly.