Luke Harnden: ƧƎӘAMI ⅃AUTIЯ

Sean Horton (Presents) is pleased to announce ƧƎӘAMI ⅃AUTIЯ – the New York solo debut of Los Angeles-based Luke Harnden. The exhibition is the second of three exhibitions during the gallery’s fall residency at 958 Madison Avenue in New York City.

Upon first impression Luke Harnden’s paintings resemble cathode ray television screens frozen between static and image. Tuning one’s eye, the viewer steps back, squints and then moves towards the painting as if to fiddle with the rabbit ears. With closer inspection the horizontal static lines, and the image hovering on the surface beneath, create a dynamic tension between handmade and mechanical, tangible and virtual, paint and image. As seemingly familiar images of a car, a panda bear or a palm tree recede and protrude from the staticky veil, the artist reminds us that images are experienced as well as made. Our highly idiosyncratic responses to images are reflexively conjured in an almost magical, or ritualistic, fashion.

Seeing images can be an affirmation of our lived experience, but within the power that images wield, there is a constant need to decode their language and thereby question the maker’s intention. To quote the artist: “Ritual Images references both the visceral act of looking as well as the act of making what is seen. They are recognizable while having that recognition disturbed by the visible structure that supports them. If the aim of the technical apparatus is to vanish into illusionistic depiction thereby quickening its reception, then Ritual Images' aim to slow that reception by revealing its architecture, serving as a reminder of its constructed nature.“ 

Luke Harnden (b. 1979, New Orleans, LA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from the University of Texas at Dallas and has exhibited at the Box Co., Site 131 and Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas.