Falling Angels marks Max Hooper Schneider’s return to his hometown of Los Angeles after numerous lockdowns and a multi-institutional tour abroad. For his solo presentation at François Ghebaly, Max Hooper Schneider presents a collection of “climax communities” in which the pioneers of devastated biomes have succeeded their former occupants — an alternative reality where humans have been evicted from their position of centrality, their planetary heimat being opened to the cacophony of stories told by other species or “things.” “Humans may be gone,” says Hooper Schneider, “but their relics survive and have become the homes of new settlers. The works operate in two zones simultaneously, that of the traumatic and that of the marvelous, and it is the tension between them that is the true signature of the works.” You can see them as landscapes in their terminal state, but they also flourish.